Fearful Symmetry
by septithol
Summary: In the time of the Future Imperfect events, a girl grows up, trying to save what is left of the animals in the Bronx Zoo from the ravages of war. In a world ruled by one monster, can another monster be any better? What makes the difference between a monster and a man, anyways? Tags Maestro, Hulk, Morbius, Vampire
1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1. The Last Zookeeper

By the time Aster was 8 years old, she had learned most of the rules her father had taught her.

There were many rules, of course, and they were hard to keep track of. This animal had to have this food, for instance. It was safe to get into the large cage with most birds to feed or clean them, but anything with sharp teeth, or bigger than she was had to be in the smaller cage that was in back (and locked in very carefully!) before she could go into the bigger cage. Taking care of the cages was hard, dirty work. The shovel Aster used had been made before the War, and was meant for an adult. She had to wrap both hands tight around the handle and push it with her shoulder, which hurt. But all the dirty straw full of poop had to be gotten out. The animal poop smelled bad, too, and got all over her clothes and hands no matter how careful she was. Then, once the cage was clean, she had to get a bucket of water from one of the ponds, pour it on the floor and mop it, then bring clean straw and throw it down. That was messy, too, and between the poop, and the water, and the bits of straw, she always had to take a bath at the end of the day.

There was far too much work for just Aster and her father, of course. Aster's sister was just a baby and couldn't help, so her father had other men that came every day to help. They were a lot bigger than Aster and she asked her father why they couldn't do all the work, but he said that she would someday be Zookeeper after him, and had to learn responsibility. Aster wasn't quite sure what that meant, she guessed it meant doing things that need to be done like helping with the animals and her sister. The other men did not live in the zoo like Aster and her father and sister, so maybe they did not have responsibility. Whatever that meant.

A lot of cages were empty, of course. Her father had tried to explain to her about that, that something called 'refrigerants', and parts for machines he showed her called 'aeraters' had run out after the war. So there were no penguins or polar bears in the Bronx Zoo (even though their pictures were still by the empty cages and tanks), and the only fish were fat catfish in ponds outside that they sometimes had for supper, and sometimes her father traded for things that he needed.

Winter was harder. For the past few years she had helped her father and the other men who worked at the Zoo pile up huge mounds of leaves and straw in the cages of a building that said 'World of Reptiles' on it once fall started coming, and in the winter her father put several barrels inside where he kept small fires burning. The building was still very cold, and Aster asked her father why it had to be so cold, but didn't understand his answer. What did cold have to do with sleeping? When she got too cold in bed, she always woke up and had to get more blankets. There were special rules for the World of Reptiles building, of course. Some of the snakes had a large red sign in front of their cages that said 'venomous' and Aster's father had told her that she was never-ever to open those cages. Their teeth were too dangerous, he had told her. They could kill her with one bite. Aster didn't understand that, because most of them had teeth that looked very small. Much smaller than the teeth on the lynx, which he sometimes let her feed (but only if he was close by). If the teeth on the lynx were not that dangerous, how could the smaller teeth on the Venomous snakes be? Aster asked her father about that, and finally he had caught a rat and thrown it still alive into the cage of the "Diamondback Rattlesnake". The snake stuck out it's tongue a few times, smelling the rat Aster knew, then suddenly, so fast she could barely see it happen, it lunged out at the rat and bit it, leaving only two small holes. Aster had been bitten worse than that by a dog once, it hurt for a while, but certainly didn't kill her. But the rat staggered off, looking sick, it kept falling down, and soon couldn't get up at all, and the snake came over and started eating it.

"Poison." Her father explained. "The snakes that say 'Venomous' on their cages have poison in their teeth. It killed the rat, and it can kill you. Sometimes what you can't see is more dangerous than what you can. So you keep out of those cages, you hear?"

Aster did not want to be dead like the rat. She always carefully read the cages in the reptile building to see if they said 'venomous' before she cleaned them or put food in.

There were a lot of Reptiles that were gone, of course. Aster's father said there was no room in the World of Reptiles building for alligators and crocodiles. He was sad when he said it. He said there might still be alligators and crocodiles somewhere in the world, far away down south. Then again, they might be extinct. The war had killed most of the world. Her father told her that. He was sad when he said it. Most of the animals that used to exist were probably extinct, he said.

The poison snakes scared Aster but even more scary was the Mouse House. It was dark in there, so Aster had to bring a lantern with her whenever she cleaned the cages, and the tunnels seemed like scary caves, especially water often dripped down the walls, and there were strange echoes, and the glass windows of the cages were shaped like huge, wide gravestones with writing on top telling what animal was inside. Or used to be insde, before the War. There were tiny creatures in there like bats that usually hid, but sometimes ran or flew around when Aster wasn't expecting it, or looked at her with tiny black eyes that seemed like they could see her no matter how dark it was. But her father said they were lucky to have the Mouse House. He said it had made a pretty good fallout shelter, when the war had happened. That had been a long time ago, when Aster's grandfather had been the Zookeeper.

Aster always wrote down the rules her father had taught her about the Bronx Zoo in a notebook. She had known how to read since she was 4. Her father had taught her. She liked to read. Sometimes she went a few blocks away to several buildings that her father called a 'Library'. It was a bit scary going to the Library, sometimes. The Maestro had brought books from several old libraries into some new buildings in the city where they lived, Dystopia. That had been a long time ago. The Maestro no longer cared about books, her father said one night. Aster thought maybe he was drunk when he said it. He had traded some catfish from the pond for some bottles of wine earlier that day. Then he told her to never-ever say that to the Maestro. He got more drunk after that, started crying, and fell over on the floor, crying about Aster's mother, who had died three years ago when Aster's sister was born. Aster tried to pull her father into bed, but he was too heavy.

Her father slept most of the next day, so Aster was naughty and didn't help the men clean the cages and feed the animals, and instead she went to the Library when she was done and read some of her favorite books. 'Fairy Tales', her father called them. They were about the world a long time ago, the world even before the world that had been destroyed in the War. There was a lot of magic in them, but her father said there was no such thing as magic. At least not any more. They were just stories. And there was no happy endings in the real world, like in the stories. That made Aster sad. Why couldn't things be happy? The zoo made her happy. Usually the library made her happy, too, even though it was a little scary leaving the Zoo to go there. The air was drier outside the Zoo and smelled bad, and there were crowds of people. Some of them looked mean at Aster, in a way that reminded her of the tigers in the Zoo, but if they tried to bother her, she told them that she was the daughter of the Zookeeper and showed them a shiny card her father had given her called an 'I.D.' and after that they left her alone, even though they still gave her mean looks. She didn't care about the mean looks, any more than she did from the tigers, provided they were inside the cage, so that was alright, and she would just keep going to the library to find new books to read.

The Maestro sometimes came to the Zoo, of course. Her father explained the rules to Aster, that she was never to talk to the Maestro. Only he was to talk to him. Her father seemed very afraid of the Maestro, which Aster didn't understand. The Maestro had always been there, like the zoo, and the library, and the animals like the venomous snakes or tigers. The Maestro was much bigger than her father, of course, but so were the buffalo, and her father was not afraid of them. And Aster was short for her age, pretty much all grownups were much taller than her, and she really didn't think much about whether they were taller than each other or not. He was also green, but she didn't think about that much, either. Some of the men who sometimes came to help with the zoo were so dark brown they were nearly black, so Aster supposed there were a lot of different colored people in the world, just like the stray cats that ran around the zoo to eat mice came in a lot of colors.

Usually the Maestro came to ask for a deer or a buffalo. To eat, her father said. Or to make leather boots from. He would look at the numbered brands on the animals, then read in a large book he sometimes wrote in late in the evening, and point to the ones he wanted the Maestro to take. The older males, her father said, though he didn't say why, and they all looked mostly the same to Aster anyways. Sometimes the Maestro would take different ones anyways, and her father wouldn't say anything. Aster wanted to make a face at the Maestro for not following the Rules of the Zoo, but her father had said she must never, ever do that in front of the Maestro, so she always looked at the ground and stuck out her tongue later, after the Maestro was gone.

Other times the Maestro would come to the zoo, just to look at the animals. "He's like a boy." Her father said once. That's why he came to the zoo, but didn't care about reading anymore. Once the Maestro got angry that there weren't very many birds in the zoo. Her father did something very strange then, that Aster didn't understand. He bowed down in front of the Maestro, and begged the Maestro to forgive him. Birds were very sensitive to the weather and something called 'radiation'. Most of them had died before the Maestro had built Dystopia, her father said. The Maestro started laughing the moment her father said the word 'radiation', though Aster had no idea what was so funny about 'radiation', whatever that was. Then he told her father to make sure he bred more deer and buffalo, and went away.

Once the Maestro was gone, and it wasn't against the Rules for Aster to talk, she asked her father: "What's radiation?"

"Poison." He said.

"Like in the snakes?"

Her father nodded. "Yes, but worse. At least you can see a snake. And there used to be shots you could get to cure snake venom. You can't see radiation at all. It's in the ground, and the air, and the food. The bombs used in the war made a lot of radiation all over the whole world. It kills everything. And there's no cure."

"How come we're still alive, then?"

"Sorry, my mistake." her father said. "It kills almost everything. A very few things, it makes stronger. Like the Maestro. Radiation is like food, for him. He got stronger after the war, and built Dystopia to keep radiation out, so we can live here."

"He saved us, then?"

Her father shook his head. "He didn't do it for us."

"Who did he do it for?"

"Himself." The word sounded like a curse, and Aster could tell her father was getting angry, so she didn't ask any more questions, even though she didn't understand what her father had said.

When Aster was ten years old, she knew a lot more than she had at eight. She was sometimes allowed to feed the small rattlesnakes, but not the coral snakes or cobras yet. There was a list of the ones she was allowed to feed. Her father had taught her a lot of things she had to know to run the zoo. He didn't have any other children, so she would have to be Zookeeper someday, he said. The animals had to be saved. He taught her how to make squares to understand 'genetics' of an animal, and how to select which male and female animal to breed together. It was bad to breed together animals that were closely related. He showed her why, on the squares. A lot of the animals would not breed, even though her father put them together in the spring, and sometimes even did a funny dance in front of them. It was because they were 'imprinted' on people. They wanted to have sex with people, rather than animals. Astrid thought that was terribly funny and laughed for nearly a minute until her father scowled angrily at her.

"It's not funny. It's a damned nuisance."

"Why?"

"If they won't mate with each other, they have to be artificially inseminated. Only way to keep the species alive."

"What's artificially inseminated?"

"Something like sex. But not as fun. It's a damned nuisance, like I said. Nothing but a trick on nature."

"Will you show me? If it's for keeping the animals alive, then I need to know it to be zookeeper, don't I?"

For some reason her father looked like he didn't want to show her. Then he sighed. "I suppose you have to learn sometime. I won't live forever. I'll show you on a deer."

Most of the deer were tame, and her father easily caught a buck with large antlers, which he brought into a building where Aster had never been before. It was very clean there, and full of shiny metal things. He put it on a metal platform and buckled several straps around it. Then he did something surprising, reaching down and grasping it underneath from where it peed.

"This is embarrassing, but necessary." He told Aster, though she didn't understand what was embarrassing about it. "But living where we do… with the… well, we really can't afford squeamishness. Think of this as a job. Not a fun job, any more than cleaning the cages is fun. But it needs to be done, to keep the animals alive."

Her father moved both his hands under the animal for a few minutes, causing the deer to thrash around in the restraints and bellow loudly. Eventually, he took one hand away, reached for a large glass test tube, and held it under the deer's penis, where it filled with a liquid that looked to Aster to be something like runny boogers. He took a syringe and sucked the liquid up.

"It's important to do this quickly", he told Aster. "The sperm doesn't live very long outside the animal."

They went back out to the deer, and her father went up to a doe and put the syringe into the hole between her legs and squirted the liquid into her.

"That hole is the female deer's vagina." Her father explained. "If it were spring, and I did this, the sperm would make her pregnant with baby deer. I have to do this with a lot of animals that are imprinted on humans, because they won't have sex."

"Is sex with people, like that?"

"Oh, brother. Now's a fine time to discuss the birds and the bees." Her father rolled his eyes. "What I just did was a job. Not a fun job, but a necessary job. Something to get over with as quickly as possible. Sex with people is more fun. Usually they like to take their time, to make the fun last longer. You'll understand in a few more years, when you get interested in boys."

Aster pulled a face at that. Boys were annoying. They teased the animals and threw stones when they came to the Zoo. She supposed her father had once been a boy, but he was, well, her father. Not a boy. Her father laughed at Aster's face and ruffled her hair.

She thought for a moment about what they had done. "What's a trick on nature?" she asked her father.

"Well, nature works in a certain way, most of the time. But sometimes you can play tricks on it, to get things done the way they normally wouldn't work in nature. For instance, normally animals have babies by having sex. But if they won't, you can do what I just did, to get them to have babies anyways. There's a lot of ways to play tricks on nature. Not all of them good. Technology and machines are nothing but one big trick on nature, and that's what made the War. Human wisdom, unfortunately, often doesn't keep up with human intelligence. It hardly ever does, in fact."

"I don't understand. I thought the machines saved work."

"Never mind." Her father sighed. "It isn't important. Most of the machines are gone, except from here, and they aren't making them any more anyways. Someday they'll all be gone. Learning to run the Zoo is more important. We need to keep the animals alive. I'm going to give you some books to read about this. Also some books to start you out learning veterinary medicine. Make sure you study them hard. I'm going to buy some small goats for you to practice things like artificial insemination, giving intravenous fluids, and setting bones on. You can start out on them, even if they get out of the restraints, they can't hurt you."

Something occurred to Aster. "How do you do that to a tiger… if you have to, I mean. If the deer escapes from the straps it'll probably just run away and kick stuff. The tiger would kill you. Wouldn't it be dangerous?"

"A good question. Shows you're thinking." Aster beamed under the approval. "I haven't had to, very often. When I do, I generally buy some opium in the market, and sedate them. I'll get you a book about how to do that, you'll probably have to sedate animals sooner or later for medical treatment or even surgery, and it's important to know how to do that. You need to know the right amount to give them. If you give a goat the same amount of opium you would give a tiger, you'll kill it, and if you give a tiger the same amount you give a goat, you won't even make it drowsy and it'll rip your head off."

Opium was, of course, the only drug they had for surgery. It came from poppies grown in greenhouses. The Maestro ordered it grown. Her father said that the Maestro like to use 'opium derivatives' such as something called 'heroin' to control people, and warned her never to take it if it were offered.

"I won't" Aster promised. It was a promise she would eventually break, but she meant it at the time.

A lot of the books her father gave her were yellowing, with brittle pages. He said the books were very old, and people had used more modern drugs for surgery before the War. But now, opium was all they had. Aster had to learn a lot of things, like how to make the opium from the flower, and how to administer it. The latter was pretty disgusting. You had to put little pieces of opium up an animal's butt. You couldn't feed it to them, or they would likely throw up. Aster told her father that putting things up a butt hole was disgusting, and her father told her to forget about it. It was just another job you needed to do for the zoo, like cleaning up the cages. Astrid made a face and read some of her old fairy tale books, she liked the stories about the handsome prince who saved the princess from evil queens and fairies. Maybe when she got interested in boys, the way her father said she would in a few years, she would find a handsome prince to come marry her and live at the zoo with her. After all, her father had once been married. Before Aster's mother had died, giving birth to her younger sister.

Aster's sister was 5 years younger than her. She loved her sister, but felt bad for her. Whatever had killed their mother had left her sister weak her whole life. Or maybe it was because she didn't get mother's milk but only cow milk. Her father said that goat milk would have been better, but there hadn't been very many goats in Dystopia at the time. Her real name was Tina, but Aster always called her 'Thumbelina' or 'Thumb', because she was so tiny like Thumbelina was in the books about Fairy Tales that Aster liked to read. After a while, Aster's father got into the habit of calling her that, too. He told Aster that she would probably eventually grow much bigger, but her sister would always be small.

"The runt of the litter." He said sadly. He made Aster promise always to take care of her sister.

"I will." Aster tried to teach her sister to read, and eventually she learned, but was never as fast at reading as Aster. She liked the fairy tale books, though, so one day Aster gathered up all that she owned and gave them to Thumb. Her father said that if Aster was going to be Zookeeper someday, she needed to learn a lot of things. Real things, not stories. She had to memorize what the different animals ate, and what to do with them in the winter, and much harder things, such as what to do if they had trouble giving birth, how to set their bones, what their bones and teeth looked like, and even really gross things like what their poop should look like looking at their poop to see if they were sick or had parasites.

Her father would often quiz Aster, he would bring in a bone or a tooth or a stick with bite marks or a piece of poop and make her tell him what animal it had come from. Sometimes he brought in dead animals and made her cut them up and tell him what all the different parts were inside. Astrid cried once when he brought in a dead kitty. She liked kitties. Her father told her that if she learned well, she might be able to save the lives of other kitties, someday. That made Aster stop crying. She supposed the dead kitty would stay dead whether she cut it up or not, so it was more important to learn so she could save the live kitties, and the other animals at the Zoo.

Sometimes Aster would walk with her sister, Thumb, around the Zoo. Thumb liked being with her, and Aster would pick tulips (or other flowers if the tulips were not blooming) and put them behind Thumb's ear. Thumb asked why she did that, and Aster said: "Well, because Thumbelina always sat inside a tulip in the story."

Then she would tell Thumb to hush. She practiced reciting what she knew about animals as she walked around the zoo.

"Red Fox. Vulpes Vulpes. Mammal. Carnivore. "

"Buffalo. Bison bison. Mammal. Herbivore."

"Tiger. Panthera Tigris. Mammal. Obligate Carnivore."

"What's 'obligate' mean?" Thumb asked.

Aster thought for a minute. "It means it has to. It has to eat meat. Father says that things like dogs and foxes can live on vegetables for a while, if you know which vegetables to give them to give them the right nutrition, but that tigers have to eat meat. Otherwise they'll go blind, and then die."

"That's gross." Thumb complained.

"You don't have to feed them." Aster said. "You're lucky. Father says he's going to try and find me a bow pretty soon and teach me to hunt rabbits and stuff. Getting enough meat for the tigers and wolves is expensive. Sometimes the Maestro gives us meat, but it's never enough, and then Father has to go buy extra in the market. At least the Buffalo are cheap to feed. They eat grass, and people can't eat that. But people like to eat meat, too, like the tigers."

Thumb had no more questions, so Aster went on with practicing what she knew about the animals. Soon, she finished with the outdoor mammals and went into the World of Reptiles building.

"King Cobra. Ophiophagous Hannah. Reptile. Hibernates in the Winter. Obligate carnivore. Preferably Ophiophagous."

"What's 'Oh-fee-fage-us'?" Thumb asked.

"Ophiophagous." Aster corrected in a scolding voice. "It means it prefers to eat other snakes. But we don't have that many snakes. Father usually has to feed it by chopping meat really fine, and forcing it down the snake's throat. It's not easy, either. They're really poisonous and father has to pay a lot to get anyone to help him. Then if they puke, he has to do it again."

"Can't the Maestro help him?" Thumb asked? "I heard nothing could hurt him."

Aster had asked her father that very same question once, about a year ago, and hadn't gotten a clear answer, except that apparently the Maestro was very busy doing other things.

"The Maestro's the King." She explained to Thumb. "He has much more important things to do than feeding snakes. That's Father's job."

"Someday it'll be your job, won't it?"

"Yes. That's why I have to learn."

Aster liked the garter snakes (Thamnophis Sirtalis) best in the World of Reptiles building. They were tame, and would take worms and bits of fish right from her hands. They had a lot of babies, too. Father sometimes fed the garter snakes to the King Cobras. He said the King Cobras brought in more money than garter snakes. They needed the money, to take care of the animals. But it still made Aster sad.

After the World of Reptiles building, Aster went to the Mouse House. She lit one of the oil lanterns that were kept just inside the doorway with a match, and went in, carefully holding it away from both herself and Thumb. She was not afraid of being in the Mouse House as she had been when she was only eight. There had once been many more types of animals in the Mouse House, but father said that different species of mice just ate food without bringing up money. There were some mice, of course, but they were in cages in the other buildings, and mainly fed to things like the snakes. Otherwise, the building now had mainly animals the people in Dystopia (and more importantly, the Maestro) were more interested in, like small monkeys and different types of bats. That was okay with Aster, she had seen different types of mice in some of her father's books, and there were so many of them and they all looked so much alike to her that she wasn't sure she would have been able to tell the difference between them all.

The tiny black eyes on the bats didn't scare her anymore, either. Bats had a different way of seeing, with sound, not with their eyes. Sometimes Aster tried closing her eyes in the Mouse House and making different sounds, sometimes squeaking like the bats, sometimes just shouting, but all that happened was that she heard her own voice echoing. She couldn't see anything the way the bats could. She stuck out her tongue at one of the bats. Too bad she couldn't steal it's ears. It would be neat to see things in the dark by shouting. She could sneak up on one of the nasty boys who teased the animals that way and really scare him.

She recited all the facts about the different bats as she walked past them, until she came to the last cage in the building.

"Common Vampire Bat. Desmodus Rotundus. Mammal. Obligate haemovore."

Thumb wrinkled her nose at more long words. It didn't seem fair that Aster was not only bigger than her, but seemed three times smarter, and got smarter every day, while Thumb struggled with fairytale books and took all day to read a book that Aster said usually took her less than an hour to read when she had been five like Thumb. But maybe if she listened enough to Aster she could learn to be as smart as she was someday. "What's 'hee-mo-vore' mean?"

"Blood." Aster answered the question absently as she tapped on the smeared glass to make the vampire bats fly around a bit rather than just hanging there doing nothing. Eventually she did get a few to flutter from one branch to another, where they promptly went back to sleep. Stupid, lazy things, Aster decided. She turned back to Thumb. "The vampire bat feeds on blood."


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2. The Youngest Vet

_Take the children and yourself  
__And hide out in the cellar  
__By now the fighting will be close at hand  
__Don't believe the church and state  
__And everything they tell you  
__Believe in me, I'm with the high command_

_There's a gun and ammunition  
__Just inside the doorway  
__Use it only in emergency  
__Better you should pray to God  
__The father and the spirit  
__Will guide you and protect from up here_

_Swear allegiance to the flag  
__Whatever flag they offer  
__Never hint at what you really feel  
__Teach the children quietly  
__For someday sons and daughters  
__Will rise up and fight while we stood still_

**_Silent Running_**_ \- Mike and the Mechanics_

When Aster was 12, there was a lot of trouble in Dystopia for a short while. Some people, led by an old man called Rick Jones did not like the Maestro. Aster wasn't entirely sure why. But she did know that she didn't like the trouble. Sometimes there were explosions in the night, that upset the animals in the Zoo, and she would have to run out with a lantern, in her pajamas and slippers, to help her father try and calm them. Usually simply talking to them in a calm voice did the trick. Otherwise giving them a small treat, a few apples for the deer or buffalo, or a piece of rabbit for the tigers did the trick.

Worse than the explosions at night was the fact that the fighting against the Maestro made a lot of people afraid to go out, even during the day. Not as many people visited the Zoo, and money was short. Aster had long since become a very good shot with the bow, and sometimes went on the outskirts of Dystopia, where there were rabbits and wild dogs. A lot of times they were deformed, from the radiation. Once you left Dystopia, the radiation levels went up, and the animals had obviously migrated from Outside. Her father worried about the animals being radioactive, but could not find a Geiger counter for sale anywhere. At least not for any reasonable price. Eventually, he went to the Library and came back with a book that showed how to build something called an 'electroscope' from an old jar, a few bits of wire, and two small circles of aluminum foil. He gave Aster the electroscope, then ran his comb through his hair several times, before holding it out near the jar. The two pieces of aluminum foil moved apart as he moved the comb closer to it.

"The industrial base here is gone." Her father sighed. "They aren't making Geiger counters any more, and I can't get any of the ones that are left for love or money. But this should work. It detects certain types of radiation, as well as electricity. Carry it with you when you go hunting. If the aluminum foil leaves start moving, then get out, fast. And hold it near any animals you kill. If the leaves move, they aren't fit to eat."

Aster found that that wasn't quite true. Sometimes an animal could have static electricity in it's fur, and the electroscope would detect that. But usually putting an animal on a damp spot of ground would discharge any static, so if the electroscope detected anything after that, it had to be radiation. She also read the book her father had gotten that showed how to build the electroscope, and found out that it only detected something called 'beta' radiation. But generally where one sort of radiation existed, others did, too, so it was a pretty good device for making sure she didn't get exposed to it, or feed any radioactive meat to the Zoo animals.

Her father's comment about the 'industrial base' being gone made Aster curious, though. She had never really wondered before where the different machines in the Zoo, or Dystopia had come from. They had just been there, like the animals or the rocks or the Maestro himself. But now that she thought about it, they didn't breed like the animals. They had been made by people before the war. And there had been a lot more people then, to do things like mining metals or oil, and driving trucks and boats full of them, and making things like the machines out of them. Seven billion people, according to the old books Aster read at the library. Most of them had been killed in the War. There wasn't much mining, now. She heard a few people had tried mining for gold and diamonds in the Outside of Dystopia, but they didn't get much and often died from radiation, because they didn't have a Geiger counter. And apparently most people didn't go to the Library to find out what an electroscope was like her father had.

All the metal now, and the machines, had been made before the war. A few people melted the old metal down and made things out of it, but they were just simple things like pots and pans and horse shoes. Nothing like the old machines like cars and trucks and airplanes. They still ran, but there were fewer of them than there had been, because they weren't making the parts to fix them any more, either. Apparently just making the parts required an Industrial Base. A lot of the cars in Dystopia had metal or wooden wheels, because there were no more factories making 'radial tires' like cars used to use.

Aster thought about that. A lot of food was brought into Dystopia on trucks. Trucks were machines, too. What happened when all the machines were gone? How would they get food? There were wagons pulled by horses, but horses couldn't pull as much as trucks, and there were an awful lot of people living in Dystopia.

That worried her so badly she had trouble sleeping that night, even though there weren't any of the explosions that had become more frequent. The next morning while eating some oatmeal she asked her father: "What happens when all the trucks wear out? How will we get food from the Outside?"

Her father looked startled. "What made you think of that?"

"Just what you said a while back when you showed me how to use that little electroscope. That people didn't have an 'Industrial Base' anymore, to make Geiger counters with. People aren't making trucks any more, either. What happens when they all wear out?"

Her father shook his head. There was no point in worrying a 12 year old child with the fact that their world was inevitably doomed. Sometimes he wondered why he even bothered trying to preserve the zoo animals. There was nowhere for them to live, that he knew of.

"The trucks are made to last a long time." He told Aster. "Most of them can run for at least a million miles. And there's plenty of fuel. They won't wear out for a long time, yet."

That Aster would probably live to see the end of trucks and fuel was something he did not worry her with. There were far more immediate worries. Money. And food. Both were always short, and had gotten shorter since Rick Jones had started his ill advised terrorist actions.

"See if you can find a deer today." He told Aster. "Something big. And some long thin branches, from a weeping willow or a raspberry. I want to try to teach your sister to make baskets. She's not strong enough to help much with the animals, but she can do that, to make extra money."

Aster did not find a deer but did kill two wild dogs. Or perhaps they were coyotes. It was hard to tell, the two often interbred, and the fact that one of the coyotes had an extra leg didn't help. It wasn't radioactive, though, so they fed most of it to the tigers, and just kept a leg for themselves. It tasted horrible even after they spooned boiled raisins onto it, and Aster's father said that if the Maestro didn't want a buffalo anytime soon, they might be able to slaughter one of them for themselves next month.

There were no more explosions at night for a few more weeks after that, which made Aster happy. Then one night, there was a fairly loud explosion, followed by a huge flash of light. The noise woke Aster up in time to see the flash, and she got out of bed and pressed her nose against her window.

"What's going on?" Thumb whimpered.

"I don't know. Probably Rick Jones and his idiot terrorists again. All they know how to do is cause trouble and wake up the animals at night." She kept her nose pressed against the window. Usually there was more than one explosion, or at least sirens or something, whenever the terrorists were up to their usual destructive tricks. But there was nothing. Dead silence.

Then all the electric lights in Dystopia went out.

Thumb screamed. "What's happening?"

Aster was scared herself, but her father had told her that whenever anything bad happened, like the terrorists causing trouble, she needed to be brave for her sister. He said the terrorists wouldn't bother them, anyways. They weren't interested in animals, they just hated the Maestro.

"It's nothing. It's just dark like in the Mouse House."

"Did they blow up the power plant?" Thumb started crying. "If they blew it up, the lights will never go back on."

"I don't think they blew it up. That would be a really thing stupid to do. But even if they did, there's other power plants in different cities. The ones Outside where no-one lives any more. The Maestro can go pick one up and bring it here. He can do anything."

"Oh. Yeah."

The reassurance that the power plant would be fixed, one way or the other, seemed to calm Thumb. Aster picked up the lantern on her dresser and felt around for some matches. Matches were becoming more expensive, too. She wasn't sure how they were made. Did they need an 'Industrial Base' like trucks and tires? What would happen if matches ran out? How would they make fire?

She put the matches down and went into the kitchen, where there was a banked fire in the iron stove. She took a small set of tongs and used it to take a small coal out of the stove, then brought that back to her and Thumb's room, and used it to light the lantern.

"There! Now we have light!" She said to Thumb. "And I didn't even use a match to do it."

"That's smart!" Thumb said. She looked out the window. "Can I have the crown you made me?"

"Sure." Aster went over to a shelf that had their toys. She had found a piece of sheet brass a few months ago, just lying there on the ground, on the Outside. It wasn't radioactive, so she had tried to use a pair of her father's metal snips to cut a knife out of it, thinking she could use it when she went hunting and sell the steel knife her father had given her. Alas, a knife needed to be made of something thicker than thin sheet metal, and the crude shape she cut ended up cutting her palm and bending when she tried to use it. Not knowing what else to do with the metal, and liking the gold color of it, she cut the brass into a zig-zag shape, fastened the two ends together by cutting two slits in the metal and bending the remains of her would-be knife through them.

She put the crown on Thumb's head. "There, now you're Princess Thumbelina. Just like in the books, after she married the Fairy Prince."

"Will I be married someday?"

"Probably." Aster said. "Probably sooner than me. I have to run the zoo. And you're prettier than I am."

The latter statement was true enough. The two girls were opposites in many ways. Aster was smarter, healthier, and stronger. But when it came to looks, Thumb was the one who was blessed. Aster had mouse brown hair that she kept cut short to try to keep it easier to clean, and at the age of 12, when most girls were starting to look like women, still looked like a boy. And a short boy, at that. Thumb was weaker, not as smart, often sick, but between her delicate, perfect face, and curled, golden hair, in the world before the War could easily have made a fortune as a child model.

The power blackout had not gone unnoticed by their father, and the next day he told Aster that she was old enough to tell the men who worked in the zoo what to do for the day, while he left the Zoo and found out what was wrong with the power plant. Before he returned, however, the power came back on, and both Aster and Thumb were happy to see the lights shining in Dystopia when evening came. Their father came back shortly after dark, and told Aster that she had done a good job being in charge of the Zoo that day.

Aster beamed under the praise and asked her father: "Did you find out what made the power go out last night?"

"Rumours." Her father said. "The power plant itself wasn't damaged badly. Though I expect you already know that, since the lights are back on. But the word is that Rick Jone's and his terrorists got a hold of a Time Machine, somewhere. I don't know what they used it for, but it can't be anything good. But anyways, it was the power taken up by the Time Machine that caused all the other electricity to go out. A fuse or a breaker blew somewhere. Or maybe they somehow diverted all the power to their machine. I don't know. But it's fixed now."

"What's a Time Machine." Aster asked. "Is it like a giant clock?"

"No, it's nothing like a clock. It's a nasty trick on nature." Her father looked annoyed, which meant that a Time Machine was something Bad. "It lets you go back into a time many years in the past, or in the future. To change things that happened. Or bring things from the past or future back here."

"And that's bad?" Aster was pretty sure from the way her father looked that it was very bad indeed, but she was curious about the Time Machine.

"Very Bad." Her father said firmly. "Remember all the bombs used in the War, that nearly destroyed the world? With a Time Machine, people could go into the past and get more bombs, to kill even more people."

"What about the animals in the Zoo!" Aster was dismayed. "Would it kill them, too?"

"Definitely them. The world's almost dead, as it is. It can't take any more damage."

Well, that settled it. If the Time Machine could bring bombs from the past, and kill the Zoo animals, then it was definitely very bad.

"I ain't never having no business with Rick Jones or his terrorists." Aster decided out loud. "I don't want no bombs that hurt the animals."

"Good." Her father nodded. "They might very well ask you to join them someday. You're a good shot with that bow of yours, and they'd be interested in that."

"The bow's for hunting. What would they want it for? To fight the Maestro, like they do? That's dumb. It wouldn't even go through his skin."

"Good. You're smart. If they ever ask you, tell them no. Don't tell anyone they asked you, but you be sure to tell them no, you hear?"

"I will." Aster reassured him again. She and Thumb cleared off the table and went to bed. She never saw her father's sigh of relief. He had gone to great troubles to give Aster and Thumb the impression that the Maestro was invulnerable. Which wasn't quite true, but if they thought that he couldn't be hurt, they wouldn't ever make the mistake of getting themselves killed by trying./p  
p style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium;"Nothing happened for a few days after that, and Aster wondered whether Rick Jones and his terrorists had even gotten a bomb after all. It seemed that if they had gotten a bomb, they would have used it. So maybe they didn't have one. Or maybe they didn't even have a Time Machine. Hell, maybe the stupid power plant had just broken down by itself and people were simply blaming the terrorists. She had read about such things before, such as something called the Reichstag Fire in a place called 'Germany', a long time ago, before the War.

For the next few weeks, things went pretty much back to normal for Aster. She was learning to do minor surgery on the animals, and first aid. Her father got a woman's body from somewhere, either the morgue or the hangman probably. He showed Aster how to do an appendectomy, cesearean, epistotomy, tracheotomy, and amputations on a person, and told her under what circumstances to do them. He said that they were some of the very few surgeries that were still possible to do safely. A long time ago, before the war, there had been other surgeries, but there had been other anesthetics than opium back then. She asked her father why he had brought a human body, she thought she was going to be a Zookeeper, not a doctor, and her father said that a veterinarian already knew most of what was needed to be a doctor for humans as well, so she might as well learn it. It was important, he said, to be as useful as possible, because Dystopia was a dangerous place for people who were not useful. Especially for women who were not useful.

"How is it dangerous?" Aster asked. "Isn't it a lot safer here, than Outside? There's no radiation."

"There's other dangers in the world besides radiation. You'll understand soon enough."

Aster didn't understand, but her father refused to talk further about it, and after a while she forgot about it, and things went back to the usual routine of studying and helping to care for the animals. She performed several tracheotomies on some rabbits, which her father pronounced a success when the rabbits lived. Then they ate them for supper. She had to do it without giving the rabbits any opium. Her father said that if someone were choking, she would have only 2 minutes to perform a tracheotomy. Not enough time to give them opium. To save lives, her father said, to be kind, sometimes you also had to be cruel. It didn't seem fair. She hunted rabbits, of course, but she always killed them right away, she didn't cut them up and keep them alive after that. It was gross. The rabbits tried to squirm away when she held them, and made this horrible SQUEAL when she jabbed the sharp end of her knife through their throat, into their windpipe. She hadn't even known that rabbits could make noise, before then. Then of course, in the beginning she didn't even do it right most of the time, and would cut into a fast bleeding artery or vein, the bright red blood jetting out over her hands and arms, and even on her face sometimes. She grimaced and wiped it off. It tasted tinny and bad. The rabbit would quickly die, the jet of blood turning to a slow trickle as it's heart stopped, and her father would say nothing, and simply take it, get another one, and tell her 'again'.

Even when she did do it right, there still seemed to be a lot of blood, and the rabbits thrashed around as she put a tube unto their windpipes, so they could breath. If they lived for at least 5 minutes, father said she had done it right. It was hard to do, you had to know just where to poke the blade in, so it would hit the windpipe, and not any veins or arteries, and just far enough and not too far, so it only made a hole in the windpipe, and didn't go all the way through, or cut it in half.

It's easier on people" her father said. "If you explain what's going on, they'll hold still for it, and since they're larger, there's more room between the blood vessels and the windpipe is larger, too.

But Aster didn't see how it would be easier on people. It would be a horrible thing to have to hurt people, to cut into their necks without any opium. Even if it was to save their lives. When she told father that he told her she was kind, but that she had to get tougher. Dystopia was dangerous to people who were too kind, just as it was to people who were not useful.

Things had been simpler when she was younger, and could just look at the animals and help keep them clean, and not have to hurt them to be useful or kind to the other animals, or to people. But maybe that's what growing up was, things got complicated and weren't always good. Eventually, Aster got used to it. What if her father were to choke? Or Thumb? Or one of her favorite kitties? It was worth hurting a few rabbits that were going to die anyways, for a few minutes, to be able to save them. And once her father said that she knew how to do tracheotomies properly, she no longer had to practice them and hurt the rabbits. Things went back to normal.

But, of course, things were not normal. As it turned out, the terrorists had not brought a bomb back from the past, in the Time Machine. They brought something far worse. The brought the Maestro himself. Aster had not really thought all that much about the Maestro before. He was something that was there, like the animals and the rocks and trees. Pretty much, he'd always been there. So far as Aster could understand, he was the King of Dystopia, though he didn't call himself the King, and apparently neither did anyone else. Everyone called him the 'Maestro'. Which meant 'Master' in some other language. Which meant King, Aster guessed.

Except, of course, it was not exactly the Maestro that Rick Jones and his terrorists brought. It was the Maestro when he was younger, and apparently the Maestro did not like himself at all when he was younger, because the two started fighting! Aster knew about this when she heard a huge explosion early one morning, a few weeks after the power had gone out, and her father came running into her and Thumb's room.

"Come on, we have to get downstairs. The Maestro is fighting the Hulk!"

Aster rubbed her eyes sleepily. "Who's the Hulk?"

"The Maestro when he was younger! Come on! Get up! We have to get into the basement! It's dangerous!"

"Dangerous?" Aster was more awake now. "What about the animals! If there's danger we got to protect them. Get them inside."

"No! This isn't a storm!" He grabbed Aster by one arm and Thumb by another and dragged them after him. "We can't protect them. We'll be lucky if we can protect ourselves!"

Things got very loud after that. It sounded like the part with the tornado in the movie 'The Wizard of Oz' which Aster and her sister had seen a few times at the movie theater they had in Dystopia. Except it was even louder than the movie, there were horrible crashes that sounded like they were terribly near the zoo, or even inside it. Aster wanted to go over to the window to see what was going on, but her father pulled her down, and made her and Thumb crawl under a sturdy wooden workbench.

"If they break the house down, the workbench is strong enough to support the weight. Someone'll dig us out, later."

Thumb stuck her fingers in her ears, frightened of the noises and shouting. It was worse than when two of the male tigers got to fighting over a female. Tigers didn't make the whole ground and house shake. And they couldn't get out of the cage no matter how mad they got at eachother.

Aster didn't stick her fingers in her ears, that was a baby sort of thing to do, and she was twelve years old and learning to be a vet and a doctor. But she wished she could. She didn't know who the 'Hulk' was, but wished he would go away back wherever he came from. Then she remembered what her father had said, that the 'Hulk' was actually the Maestro when he was younger. It must have had something to do with the Time Machine her father had said made the power go out a few weeks ago. But that didn't make any sense to Aster, either. If the 'Hulk' and the Maestro were the same person, why would they fight eachother? It didn't make any sense. If one of them killed the other, wouldn't he only be killing himself? Especially if the Maestro killed the 'Hulk', himself when he was younger, he wouldn't live after that to become the age he was now. Wouldn't he vanish or something? Aster didn't quite understand how that would work, with a time machine. And the fighting didn't make any sense, anyways. If she went into a Time Machine and met herself when she was younger, like when she was 8, she supposed she would think her younger self was kind of stupid and babyish, but that wasn't really anything to start a big fight over. Was it? If her 8 year old self didn't understand some of the things that 12 year old Aster did, like doing the tracheotomies on live rabbits (which the 12 year old Aster still didn't like very much), she'd just tell her 8 year old self to go sit down, and she'd understand it in four years, when she was twelve. What else was there to do? Punch herself? The way she did the boys who teased the Zoo animals? It would be her own nose she was punching. She'd have to be crazy or something to do that.

At twelve years old, the further realization that her assessment of insanity was, in fact, an extremely accurate one as applied to the Maestro, did not yet occur to her. It eventually would, in the not too distant future, but it did not yet. Despite intelligence, and education that already far surpassed a great many adults, even those before the war, Aster was still a child, and given the time she lived in, a remarkably sheltered child, despite the cruelty of some of the medical procedures her father insisted she learn.

For a while, things got louder and louder. The ground and whole house shook, and the shrieks and bellows of the frightened Zoo animals joined that of the two combatants. Aster heard what sounded like some bad words, and once, in a loud voice so deeply baritone that it made Aster's very stomach vibrate, something like 'SMASH!' which seemed an accurate description of what the Hulk and Maestro were doing not only to eachother, but to everything around them.

Eventually, however, there was one horrific scream, so horribly loud that it made Aster's ear ring and she wished she had put her fingers in her ears like Thumb had. Then there was a horrid laugh. But after that the noises and shouting stopped. At least for a while. After several more minutes, there was more noise, but it was different from the sounds of fighting. Aster heard sirens and shouting, but they sounded like regular people shouting, not giants like the Maestro or the Hulk. A while after that, even with the sirens and shouting, the sounds of the animals calmed down, which Aster's father said was a good sign, as animals could sense danger. But he still insisted that they all remain under the workbench for another hour at least. He even timed the hour on his watch. Aster was bored. And hungry. They had been hiding in the basement nearly the whole entire day. It was dark and damp in the basement, and the sun was starting to set, making shadows in the corners that crept forward and eventually filled the whole room. Thumb was scared of the shadows, but Aster hugged her. "It's just dark. Like in our room at night. There's nothing here but the same basement that was here before."

"I don't like it." Thumb whined. "What happened with all the fighting. It was scary."

"I don't know. It's over now. We're okay." She turned to her father. "We'll be okay, won't we? And the animals, too?"

"Yes, I think so." He got out from under the workbench, and dusted himself off. "You two stay under here. I'll make sure that it's safe."

Their father went upstairs, and was gone for a long while. Aster heard the door to the house open, then close a few minutes later. Nearly another hour went by, and there no light left in the basement at all. Aster couldn't even see her hand in front of her face. Thumb shrieked suddenly.

"What happened!"

"Something ran over my hand!" Thumb cried.

"It was probably just a spider." Said Aster.

"It was big and furry." Protested Thumb.

"Well, maybe it was a rat, then." Aster decided.

"I don't like rats. They bite!" Now Thumb was even more scared.

"They do not." Aster said.

"One bit me, once." Thumb pointed out.

"That's because you trapped it in the corner and were too much of a baby to kill it. You should have just left it alone, if you were going to be a baby like that." Aster said.

" I don't like to kill things, like you." Thumb's voice sounded petulant and Aster knew that she was probably pulling a face in the dark.

"I don't _like_ it either," Aster protested. "But it has to be done. We need to eat, and feed the animals. And I have to learn to be a vet and a doctor if I'm going to be Zookeeper someday."

"Well, I'm glad I ain't going to be Zookeeper." Thumb said. A few minutes went by. "Where do you think Father is? He's been gone, awful long."

"I don't know. I'm sure he'll be back soon", said Aster.

"What if…" Thumb's voice trailed off. But Aster knew Thumb was thinking the same thing she was. Father had been gone an awfully long time. Anything could have happened to him. Maybe the fighting wasn't over. Maybe one of the cages of the dangerous animals, the tigers, or even the wolves had gotten damaged in the fighting and the animals had gotten out and attacked Father. Aster could think of several other bad things that could have happened, as well. And what if the tigers hadn't gotten out. Even if they hadn't gotten father, they could surely smell Aster and Thumb, no more than two mouthfuls to the terrible beasts, hiding in the dark basement. Aster knew the tigers could smell far better than people could. They could see better, too. They could probably see in the dark, where Aster and Thumb were hiding. Probably they could even hear Aster's heart thumping inside her chest. For all she knew, there was one there in the basement right now, crouched only a few feet away from them, staring at them with big red eyes that glowed in the dark and getting ready to pounce! Aster knew that real tigers had yellow eyes, not red, and they just reflected light, they didn't really glow in the dark, but her fear made her imagine tigers to be even worse than they really were.

No. She couldn't think things like that, or tell Thumb what she was thinking.

"Everything will be fine." Aster finally told Thumb. "You'll see. Father's smart enough to run away if he sees anything dangerous. And it was probably just a Daddy Longlegs that ran over your hand, and the long legs felt like fur to you. Here. I'll sing you a song about spiders to make you feel better."

She felt around for Thumb's hand in the dark and sang a song she remembered their father singing, when they had both been younger:

_"The itsy bitsy spider crawled up the water spout._

_"Down came the rain and washed the spider out._

_"Out came the sun and it dried up all the rain._

_"So the itsy bitsy spider crawled up the spout again."_

Thumb laughed. It was a baby song, but made her feel better. Just then, the basement door opened.

"It's alright!" cried their father. "It's over. It's safe! Come on out. Thumb, you go to bed. Aster, grab a lantern and help me check on the animals."

"Aster scurried to obey. She walked alongside her father, checking the cages to the left, while her father checked those to the right. Most of them were undamaged. There was a large tree that had somehow been thrown onto the roof of the Mouse House, where the common vampire bats and other nocturnal creatures live, and it had damaged the roof, but the glass fronted cages inside were all intact. Aster stared at the tree. It wasn't one of the trees that grew in the Zoo, at least she didn't think so. She hadn't seen any missing trees. She asked her father where it came from.

"Could be anywhere." Her father said. "Strong as they are, either the Maestro or Hulk could have thrown it from a mile away. Or more. We should be grateful there wasn't more damage. That roof isn't too bad, I'll get the men to work on it, and it'll be good as new in just a few days."

Something occurred to Aster. "Who won the fight? The Maestro or the Hulk?"

"Oh." Her father actually seemed surprised by the question. He seemed more focused on the problem of getting the roof fixed than the dramatic fight between titans that had damaged it in the first place. "The Maestro. Not that it matters. One monster is as bad as another."

Aster puzzled that over. The fight had been scary, but it was hardly the Maestro's fault that some nut jobs had brought some younger version of himself to Dystopia in a Time Machine, to start a big fight. She supposed the Maestro was a giant, she was getting old enough to understand that no other adults were anywhere near as big or strong as he was, but she always thought of him as the King, not a monster.

"Never mind." Said her father. "It's over now. The Maestro will round up the terrorists who did all this and make an example of them, and then things will get better. You'll see."

That was a lie, of course. Though Aster's father had no way of knowing it at the time. But even if he had known it, it would have been a good lie. Troubling the twelve year old child with the horrors that were soon to come would have done nothing whatsoever to prevent them.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3. The Dead and the Quick

After the Maestro killed the Hulk, there were both immediate and long term consequences for Aster's family, and for the other citizens of Dystopia. The first thing that happened was that the very next day, about two dozen uniformed guards came to the zoo and demanded to search it for 'terrorists'. From what Aster could hear, it sounded as if they though that someplace as large as the zoo would be a good place for the 'terrorists' to hide.

Aster's father said they could search all they wanted, but that it would be dangerous for them to go into the cages with some of the animals, and he would have to move them out of the cages before they could be searched, as he didn't want the animals hurting the guards, or the guards having to shoot the animals. The guards could watch him do so, if they wished. For a few hours, the guard were marching up and down, looking into cages, and in the backs of the building such as the World of Reptiles and the Mouse House. Some of them got on ladders and looked above the ceilings of buildings. Others lifted up manhole covers with crowbars and went down into the sewers. Aster wasn't really worried. She knew there were no terrorists hiding at the zoo. Her father wouldn't allow it, and given the facts that firstly she knew the zoo like the back of her hand, and secondly, there was no way for ANYONE to sneak around the zoo without having the animals react to them in various ways, she would have known it if anyone was trying to hide there.

There were large plaques throughout the zoo, with a map of the entire zoo. The plaques had been made before the War, of course, and in some places the layout of the zoo had been altered. There were fewer animals than there had been, back when the maps were made, and they had been moved closer together, and some of the outlying parts of the Zoo had been closed off, while in other places, roads of gravel had been laid down where none existed on the map. The guards growled over every discrepancy they found between the current-day zoo and the ancient maps, and forced Aster's father to explain the differences to them numerous times as if hoping to find a flaw in what he said. Even then they weren't happy, and insisted on inspecting every difference personally, making sure that there actually wasn't anything hidden at the ends of the closed off roads, and that the new roads led where Aster's father said they did.

The guards actually seemed disappointed that they did not find any terrorists. A few of them glared at the animals and muttered things about 'waste of food' and 'eat better than we do'. Aster saw that a few of them had put some of the food they had stocked for the animals, things like corn, wheat, fruit, and dressed rabbits into sacks.

"They're stealing the animal feed." She complained to her father in a low voice.

"Forget it. They're angry and frustrated because they can't find what they're looking for. And the Maestro won't let them rest until they DO find what they're looking for. Let them take what they want, and leave. If we argue with them, they'll take more, or even arrest us."

Eventually the guards did leave, though not before one of them aimed a gun at a large goat, fired, then ran over to seize the fallen creature by the hooves. "Fresh meat tonight! With drippings! Look at the fat on it!"

Aster scowled. That was one of their prime dairy goats. The milk brought in a lot of extra money. Milk of any sort was a rare luxury in Dystopia, and someone whose wife couldn't nurse, which was a fairly common problem due to poor diet and radiation would pay almost anything for it. Plus it could have been bred for several more years at least.

Still, there were other things in the zoo besides a little food and a single goat to worry about. The tree that had been thrown was still on the roof of the Mouse House. Aster's father and some of the men who worked at the Zoo had to rummage around in the back of one of the building until they came out with axes and ladders. The climbed up on top of the roof of the Mouse house, and chopped at the tree for a while, periodically throwing branches down alongside the building. They just left them there. They weren't blocking the door, and her father said it would be free firewood, come winter time. They could be chopped up into proper lengths later, when things settled down and there was more time. Right now, the important thing to do was to get the roof repaired, which required Aster's father going to the market in Dystopia with some of the men (who pulled a large wooden wagon behind them) and buying up several pieces of lumber, boards, nails, and shingles. The latter were hard to get. There were a few working sawmills in Dystopia, although trees were rare, especially Outside, and nails lasted a long time and could be reused, but shingles to match those on the Mouse House had been made before the war. A few people were making thick, lumpy shingles out of wood, but Aster's father wanted the repair to match the rest of the building. Which it did, and in a few days, the Mouse House was as good as new.

About a week after the guards had searched the zoo, Aster's father told her that she and her sister had to come with him into the public square, just outside the Maestro's palace. Apparently the guards who had searched the Zoo, or perhaps some different guards, had finally found the 'terrorists' they were looking for. They hadn't even bothered trying to fight them. They simply called the Maestro, and the Maestro had come and killed them all. None of the bullets, grenades, or other weapons the terrorists had, had made even a scratch on him. Now, their heads were on spikes in the public square, and the Maestro had demanded that everyone in Dystopia, except 'nursing babies', come to the square to see what happened to people who rebelled against him.

Aster was 12 and her sister, Thumb' was 7, so neither of them were 'nursing babies'. So they had to go with their father to the square. It seemed like everyone else in Dystopia was going there, too. Stores, market stalls, brothels, and houses were all shut up or locked, and the streets were far more crowded than usual, with everyone headed only one way -towards the Maesto's palace, rather than going in all different directions or just standing around the way they usually did.

When Aster got to the public square, she saw over the heads of the people in front of her that there were several heads on long poles, lined up on a long wooden platform in front of the Maestro's palace. One was obviously the Hulk, it was nearly twice as wide, long, and deep as a normal head, not to mention that it had bright green skin under the crusted blood that spattered it. Plus a painted wooded sign under it said 'Hulk'. The other heads were of regular people, one very old man that said 'Rick Jones', a woman with a long, bright red braid that Aster had sometimes seen on the way to the Library had a sign under her head that said 'Janice'. And several others, which she got bored with reading after the first six or so.

Aster wasn't really sure what looking at the heads was supposed to prove. She had seen plenty of dead bodies before, sometimes when she went to the Library, she had gone through the public square and occasionally there was the body of a thief, murderer, or traitor who had been hung, and by the Maestro's law, the body could not be cut down for a full three days. And she had dissected and practiced surgery on a few bodies that her father had gotten from the morgue. So the heads didn't really frighten her. And she already knew that the terrorists had been killed for their crimes against the Maestro. What was looking at the heads supposed to do? She's have to be pretty stupid to need to look at their actual heads in order to know that they were dead, or that rebelling against the Maestro was a really bad idea. Then again, maybe people were that stupid. Take the guard who had shot the goat, for instance. A prime dairy goat, and he shot it just to eat it. If he'd had a brain, he would have recognized what the fat udders meant, and stolen the goat. He could have sold the milk for years, and used the money to buy far more meat than he would ever get from one single goat.

There was a large table in the square, where a few guards sat with thick notebooks full of blank, yellowing paper. People were going up to the tables and signing in the books. Or, if they couldn't write, which seemed to be the case more often than not, the guards would ask their name, job, and address, and write it down for them, then make the people press their finger in ink and put a fingerprint after what had been written. Aster recognized the notebooks as being the sort that was made before the War. Her father had several of them at the Zoo. Some of them were written on, others were blank and her father would sometimes write on them late at night. She supposed that notebooks were one of the things that needed an industrial base to make. Or maybe not. The metal spiral didn't seem much harder to make than the pots and pans that some people made out of melted metal, and paper and books were mentioned in some of her fairy tales that she had read when she was younger, such as the spell books used by wizards. How did one make paper without an industrial base, though? Aster wasn't sure.

Aster and her family went up to the tables, and had to sign their names in one of the notebooks. Aster's father wrote his name: Joshua Aversa." as well as his job: "Zookeeper" and where they lived: "Bronx Zoo".

He pressed his fingerprint after his name, and then it was Aster's turn. She wrote her name "Aster Aversa", and turned to her father. "Do I have a job?"

Her father seemed about to say something, then shook his head slightly. "Write, 'daughter of Joshua Aversa', and then 'Bronx Zoo' for where you live."

Aster complied, pressed an inky fingerprint after what she wrote, then stood to one side as Thumb wrote the same thing with a shaky hand. There was some delay, as their father reminded Thumb to sign her real name, 'Tina', rather than 'Thumb' as they always called her, and had to explain why with the impatient people behind them glaring angrily at the hold up. Aster took the opportunity to glance at what had been written in the notebook by the people before them, curious about who they were, as she was curious about almost everything in the world. No doubt most of the jobs, and almost all of the addresses would have seemed odd, or even shocking, to someone living before the War. Or at least, to someone living _recently_ before the war. It would have seemed more normal to someone from medieval times, when the stories in Aster's old fairy tale books had been written. But people in the twentieth century generally did not admit to being a 'pimp', 'prostitute', 'mercenary', 'metal scavenger', or 'Assassin for the Maestro' in public, or describe their address as being 'third drainage pipe down the road from the big bridge' or 'large shipping container behind the Maestro's palace, just to the east'. Even the ones with real houses, such as Aster's family were lucky enough to have, described it by nearby landmarks, rather than street names and address numbers. But it wasn't particularly strange or alarming to Aster. The jobs were the ones that regular people had in Dystopia, just as people before the war people had such jobs as 'stock boy' or 'computer programmer'.

After signing their names, then they all had to walk slowly past the heads. There were smaller paper signs below the large wooden ones with the names, describing the assorted crimes of the different terrorists. It got boring after the first few. Almost all of them were pretty much the same. Murder. Theft. Arson. Treason against the Maestro. Unauthorized use of pre-war technology. Blah, blah, blah.

Aster thought they could go home after looking at the heads. But maybe that was just wishful thinking. The heads smelled BAD, they had obviously been up on the tall spikes for a few days, and were starting to rot in the afternoon sun and attract flies. Well, all except for the large green head of the Hulk. Aster saw no sign of rot on that one, and the flies wouldn't go anywhere near it. She asked her father about that.

"Radiation. The Hulk and the Maestro are both full of radiation. It makes them stronger, but kills almost everything else. Including the bacteria that cause decay. I read in an old book once, some people used to use radiation to make food last longer. Not forever of course. The worm will have it's due."

"What's that mean… 'The worm will have it's due'?" She walked a few steps farther from the heads. The crowd was not dispersing, instead they were being ushered into the Maestro's palace in small groups. Apparently there was something more that the Maestro wanted people to see. More heads, probably.

"It means, everything dies, and afterwards it rots. Gets eaten by worms, and becomes dirt. Then the dirt grows into new plants after a while, and things live again."

"Not many plants on the Outside." She pointed out to her father. "Even though almost everything is dead, there."

"Yeah. It's the radiation, like in the Hulk's head. It kills the fly and the worm. Things die, and they stay dead. Because the worm doesn't get it's due."

"Like in the compost heap?"

"Exactly like it." Her father looked back up at the head. "The Maestro will probably burn the Hulk's head after he thinks enough people have seen it. He doesn't like to take any chances."

"Chances?" Aster blinked. "The Hulk is dead. What difference does it make what happens to his head?"

Aster's father tried to find words to explain. "Not everything dies as permanently as people and animals do. The Maestro might be afraid that the Hulk isn't really dead."

"But his head's cut off! It's up there! How much more dead can you get?"

"A regular person would be dead. But the Hulk isn't a regular person." The words to explain the precise nature of Healing Factor and regeneration had been lost to time. But there were other ways to explain. "You know that if you chop a worm in half, it doesn't always kill it. The head half sometimes lives, and grows a new tail."

"Yeah. Everybody knows that." Aster snorted. What did her father think she was, a baby?

Everybody did not know that, at least in the current times, but Aster's father didn't argue the point. "It's possible that the Hulk's head or body could heal. I don't know for sure, but both the Hulk and the Maestro have healed from injuries that would kill any normal person. The Maestro will be afraid of that happening, anyways. He'll probably destroy the head within the next three days, to make sure that doesn't happen."

Aster said nothing, digesting the strange fact of people - well maybe not exactly people - who might still be alive after their heads had been cut off. And regrow like worms. And the new fact that apparently the Maestro could be hurt, and was afraid of some things, like the Hulk. Even if the Hulk was simply himself when he was younger. She had always thought the Maestro wasn't afraid of anything and couldn't be hurt. But now that she thought about it, that was just baby thinking. The Maestro might not be afraid of regular people like her, any more than the tigers at the Zoo were afraid of her (in fact, much the opposite was true), but that certainly didn't mean that they weren't afraid of anything. They were sometimes afraid of each other (just like the Maestro was afraid of the Hulk) when they got to fighting, and even when her father wasn't able to break the fight up, after a while one of the tigers would usually give up, and either crouch down with it's ears flattened as far away from the other as it could get, or roll over in a submissive posture. They never killed each other, though, the way the Maestro had killed the Hulk.

"Why didn't the Hulk give up if the Maestro was winning the fight?" She asked her father. "The tigers and other animals in the zoo always give up, when they are losing a fight with their own kind."

"I doubt the Maestro gave him the option." Her father shook his head. "Human beings are cursed in some ways. We're smart enough to see death coming and be afraid of it, but not smart enough to do a damned thing to stop it, or even slow it down for more than a few years. And cruel enough to deal it out wholesale to one another."

"Like in the War?"

"Yes, that's pretty much the prime example, right there." He was about to go on and mention that people had not only killed not only their enemies, and a lot of innocent people as well, but almost all the other creatures in the world as well, which was far worse in many ways (both ethically and ecologically), but then he and his family were being ushered into the palace, and down a long hallway full of loud people.

The crown moved slowly down a gleaming green hallway. The cool green marble it was made of reminded Aster a bit of the Mouse House to the touch, but there the resemblance ended. The hallway was well lit, both with electric lights (not an old rusty lantern like she had to use in the Mouse House) and the sun shining through geometrically shaped stained glass windows. The windows were green, too. The color looked to Aster as if it had been made out of old green beer bottles. The light through the green glass made everyone standing in the hallway look as if they had a greenish cast to their skin, as if they were becoming a green person like the Maestro or Hulk. Here and there, a beam of regular sunlight shone through, and Aster saw were a few of the panes of green glass were missing. And had been for some time, judging by the spider webs that crossed them, as if nobody cared or was able to go to the time and trouble of melting down more beer bottles to make new panes and replacing the missing ones. There were fancy statues nude women carved of green jade set into numerous alcoves, which Aster admired. She wished she had a body like that. Maybe in a few years.

Several women came out of a side room and went past, wearing beautiful, scanty clothing made of silk and finely worked metal. It looked to be even more expensive than the clothing worn by the prostitutes in the brothel near the library that Aster liked to visit. Though just as impractical. If Aster were to wear something like that in the Zoo, the flowing silk would end up trailing in the piles of straw, leaves, and animal droppings that were everywhere in the Zoo, and she would have been scratched, blistered, and sunburned in less than an hour if she did anything like the usual amount of work expected of her. Well, probably such concerns didn't matter in the Maestro's palace. There weren't any animals here, and except for maybe the spider webs and leaves caught in the high, broken window panes, the whole place looked like it was scoured gleaming clean from top to bottom every day by an entire army of janitors. And from the looks of their soft, clean hands, the women looked like they didn't do much work, either. Aster looked at her own hands, with hard callouses across the palms and fingers, and dirt ground in under the fingernails that she could never seem to wash out, and was a little jealous. Thumb had hands like that, but Thumb was sickly and couldn't be expected to work. The women seemed healthy enough, despite that a few of them walked with minced steps, and apparently just didn't have to work.

Eventually, she, her father, and sister were ushered into a large room with a large sign above it that read: "Hall of Fallen Heroes". One of the guards pointed at the sign and said in a sneering voice: "It should say, Hall of Fallen Fools" before letting them into the room to see what was inside. To a slight degree, the room resembled the room full of animal skeletons and stuffed animals that was kept at the zoo. Except these were not dead animals in the room. They were parts of dead people. Strange dead people. There was an arm skeleton all made of metal with metal knives coming out of it, and a few skeletons that had come from people even larger than the Maestro himself. Aster looked around, and halfheartedly listened as an obviously bored guard on a platform read off a piece of paper in a loud voice. Apparently one of the terrorists, the old man 'Rick Jones' had had a rather macabre hobby of keeping souvenirs of old superheroes who had been killed by the Maestro. To honor them or something. Though Aster could hardly see how that was an honor. The stuffed animals and skeletons at the zoo were for study. When one of her favorite cats died she didn't stuff it, she buried it. Gave the worm it's due, she guessed, was what her father would say. Maybe someday the plants that grew from it would get eaten by rabbits, that would eventually get eaten by new plants.

From what the guard said, the Maestro's purpose in bringing the remains of the dead heroes to this room in his palace was actually as educational in it's own way, as the stuffed animals and skeletons at the zoo were. He intended for the people to look at them, and learn about the powers the heroes had had. Powers that had availed them nothing, when they tried to fight against the Maestro. Below each display was a chest of drawers, containing sheets of paper listing all known information about all the dead heroes in their room, including their history, battles they had fought, powers they had had. The sheets of paper were crisp, and barely yellow. Obviously printed out of a computer that still worked. Aster knew that there were working computers in the Maestro's palace, her father had mentioned it once, and a few times had gone to the Maestro's palace to get such sheets of paper printed by the computers containing some bit of information about the zoo animals that he needed, but couldn't find either in his books or the library. Some of the computers still were hooked up to a few last working remnants of something called the 'internet'. In fact, her father said that some of them still got information from old 'satellites' which apparently were machines that were up in space, far above the earth, and would stay there pretty much forever.

Aster looked inside the drawers full of papers below the metal arm bones with knives growing out of them. The language was very slightly above her current level of reading and contained some words she didn't know like 'Adamantium'. Maybe she'd be able to understand it in a few years. Probably she would be, if she worked hard at her studies. She flipped through the papers. There must have been hundreds of pages, talking about someone called 'Logan' or 'Wolverine'.

She shoved the drawer shut, and opened a few more. They were all pretty much the same, talking about people who had special strength and powers (though none of them were as strong as the Maestro, the guard kept repeating) and giving details about when they were born, what their powers were (a lot of which Aster didn't understand), who they had fought and when and whether they had run or lost. There was a fairly delicate skull on the seat of a wheelchair that said "Professor X', a skeleton that had a tail that said 'Nightcrawler', another skeleton that for some unfathomable reason (at least to Aster) was put up high on a net that resembled a giant spider web and said 'Spiderman' (though the skeleton only had 2 arms and legs, and did not at all resemble a spider). A blue and red suit of clothing, badly ripped and stained over most of it's surface with what looked like old blood, was tacked to a board that said 'Morbius: The Living Vampire.' A skeleton maybe about 7 feet tall with a hammer in it's hand that said 'Thor'. Half of a smaller skeleton that held a large colorful red, white, and blue shield with a star in the middle that said 'Captain America'.

"One artifact saved Jones. Another killed him." She heard one guard say to another, who laughed and slapped his legs. Aster wasn't sure exactly what was so funny. Probably some private joke that only the Maestro's guards would understand. There were such jokes at the zoo, told by her father or herself, or the men her father hired to help out that were only funny if you knew certain details about various animals.

The guard on the platform was still talking, about how the heroes in the room who hadn't died in the war had been killed when they were stupid enough to attack the Maestro. The Maestro was the strongest one there was, and if they were smart, they would know it and not be dumb enough to fight him, like either the heroes, or the traitors whose heads were now all on spikes in front of the palace. And just in case they were stupid enough to forget, the heads were going to stay there - permanently!, and they could look at them, or come in and look at all the dead heroes, any time they wanted. Just so they would remember what happened to weak fools who attacked the Maestro. They all ended up dead.

It kind of seemed like a lot of bragging to Aster, but all the parts of the dead people, and the heads in front were starting to make her a little bit scared.

She was not the only scared one.

"I want to go home." Thumb said, as she pulled at their father's sleeves.

"Yes, we've probably spent enough time here to satisfy them." he said. He took Thumb by one hand, turned to make sure that Aster was close behind, and they left the room with the dead heroes, pushing past the crowd of newcomers in the hallway who had not borne witness to them yet.

Aster thought over what she had seen. They were nearly all the way back to the Zoo when something occurred to her. Something that probably could have only occurred to her out of everyone in Dystopia, a highly intelligent, but slightly autistic child who knew more than any other adult in Dystopia (except her father) about animals, and without her father's lifetime of cultural conditioning to accept certain things at face value. She didn't tell her father what had occurred to her, but instead wanted to look up something in one of her books, to see if what she had thought of was possible.

"Can I go read for a bit?" She asked her father as they went through the gates of the zoo.

"Yes. You've been through enough for one day. For the past couple weeks, in fact. If you want to study, you can."

"I want to read, too." said Thumb.

Their father told them both to go ahead, and Thumb followed Aster to their room. It was not, however, studying that Aster wanted to do. Instead she went over to Thumb's bookshelf, where all the old fairytale books that she had given to her sister were lined up. She glanced at the titles, then pulled a thick volume off the shelf.

"Hey, what are you doing with my books!" Thumb protested.

"They're mine, too." Aster reminded her.

"You gave them to me! You said you did!"

"I just want to read it for a second. Then I'll give it back" said Aster. That was a bit of a mis-statement, she needed a few minutes at least, to page through the book, find the story she was looking for, and quickly re-read the few short pages it was on. But Thumb seemed satisfied that the book would be shortly returned, and sat quietly on her bed watching her older sister read.

Aster read the story a second time. Then she read it again a third time. It was a stupid story, full of pretty much all stupid people, but it told her what she had remembered from reading it back when she had been around Thumb's age. Then she closed the book and handed it back to Thumb, who put it on the shelf. She lay down on her bed, looking at the plaster and wooden beams on the ceiling, and thought about the story in the fairy tale book for a long while, and what had occurred to her on the way back from the Maestro's palace.

"I think that guard was lying." She finally said. "Or maybe he was just wrong. But I don't think he was telling the truth."

"What guard? Lying about what?" Thumb said.

"I don't know." Aster kicked her bed. She didn't understand why the guard would lie, or what was to be gained from it, but her father always told her that knowledge was important. She sat up and looked at the ragged spine of the old book of fairytales, now back on Thumb's shelf. She kicked at her bed, and lay down again, still thinking. "I don't know. But I don't think it's good."


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4. Bread and Circuses

Despite far higher than normal intelligence, Aster was still easily distracted from any purpose, like any child. The thought of the lie she was certain the guard in the Hall of Fallen Heroes had told occupied her thoughts for much of the next day, and she wondered how she could look further into the matter. Reading the files in the chests below the display that she was suspicious of was a possibility. But she didn't understand many of the words, as yet. And she didn't know what the guards would think of a girl like her spending so much time reading the files, either. She wasn't quite sure what the guards or the Maestro would do if they were caught lying, but she was pretty sure that neither of them would _like _for anyone to know they had lied. People lied because they either had something to gain, or were afraid of something. Aster was pretty sure that neither the guards nor the Maestro would like very much to NOT gain whatever it was they might gain by lying, and they would like even less to be afraid.

After all, her father had said that the Maestro was going to destroy the Hulk's head after three days, because he was afraid of it. No, making the Maestro afraid by catching him in a lie was most definitely NOT a smart thing for Aster to do. She would keep away from the Hall of Fallen Heroes for the time being, until she thought of a way to read the files she wanted to, without making anyone suspicious.

Having resolved to do nothing for the time being, the matter of the guard's lie faded to the back of Aster's mind after a few days, though she never forgot about it, and sometimes still thought about it when she was alone in places like the Mouse House.

About two weeks after everyone in Dystopia had been required to bear witness to the Maestro's power by looking at all the heads on spikes, and the remains in the Hall of Fallen Heroes, Aster and her father were surprised by the Maestro coming to the Zoo unannounced. Usually he sent a herald an hour or two ahead of him to announce that he was coming, so that the proper preparations could be made, such as sending any other visitors in the Zoo away. Aster was actually outside, pouring shriveled kernels of Indian corn into a trough in a fenced in pasture where their goats and deer lived while her father shoveled up some of their droppings into a pre-War wheelbarrow. The goats were breeding well… well, better than some of the other animals, anyways given the constant problems of radiation and inbreeding. Despite the loss of the female goat to one of the Maestro's guards a few weeks earlier, it could be that they might be able to sell a few as early as next year.

The Maestro strode down the roads of the zoo, followed by a retinue of male servants and some of the scantily clad women Aster had seen at his palace a few weeks early. Both genders of servants wrinkled their noses at the smells and filth of the zoo, as they followed the Maestro until he came to the area where Aster and her father were working. Aster's father scurried out of the pasture, brushing some of the dirt off his clothes and bowing low before the Maestro. Aster felt the Maestro's gaze on her for a few seconds, unpleasant, like that of the tigers when they hadn't been fed, and thinking of all those heads on spikes in front of the palace, took care not to look back, and fixed her gaze on the trough full of corn.

"I need you to do something for me, Joshua." The Maestro said in a growling voice.

"Yes, yes, of course." Her father kneeled down. "If it's in my power. Do you need more buffalo or deer? Or milk?"

The Maestro waved his hand dismissively at the offer. "The rebels had amazingly good food supplies. We think they were being helped from Outside. I won't need anything along those lines from you… for a while. In fact, I may even give you some extra meat for you animals and family. What do you say to that?"

"I would say you were most generous, my Lord."

Aster tried to step sideways into the shadow of a tree, but the motion attracted the Maestro's attention again. She felt his squinting green eyes on her.

"Is that your daughter, Joshua? What's she doing in there with those goats and deer? How old is she?"

"She's only twelve, my Lord. She's in there because I'm training her to care for the animals. To be Zookeeper someday."

"You have no sons?" the low voice sounded threatening. Though why the Maestro should be displeased by either her being a girl, or the fact that her father didn't have any sons was unclear to Aster.

"No, my lord. Only the two daughters. And the younger one is sickly. I doubt she could handle the work."

The Maestro looked at Aster for several more seconds, obviously disapproving of her for some reason Aster didn't understand. Finally he looked away.

"Your daughter is ugly. She looks like a boy. But run your zoo however you like, Joshua." The Maestro finally said. "As long as you keep in mind who you serve."

"Yes, my lord." Then, in an attempt to distract the Maestro's attention from his older daughter, he changed the subject. "You said you had a request for me, my Lord."

"Yes." The Maestro did not seem to notice the obvious distraction, and much to Aster's relief, turned his gaze away from her and back to her father. Obviously, whatever it was that brought him to the zoo was of far more importance to him than one ugly girl in the deer cage.

"The people don't respect me, Joshua" The Maestro said.

"My Lord, everyone here respects you." the zookeeper hastened to assure him.

It was the wrong thing to say. The Maestro took Joshua's head between one large finger and thumb, and squeezed slightly, enough to hurt him badly, but not enough to cause injury. "Don't patronize me. They _fear _me. But they don't _respect_ me. If they did, they wouldn't have rebelled against me and forced me to make an example of them. I need them to respect me. I need something… impressive."

"I'm not sure how I can help you with that, my Lord." the zookeeper said, wincing from the pain of the Maestro's fingers gripping his head. "But I will do whatever I can."

The Maestro seemed satisfied that the pain had made his point, and released Aster's father. "A large part of the problem is how I travel. My presentation, as it were. I'm too large to ride a horse. I've tried to get my stablemen to breed larger draft horses, but their best efforts have been… disappointing"

He paused for a few secondly, allowing Aster's father time to wonder what sort of fate befell those who 'disappointed' the Maestro, even through no fault of their own. "I have chariots and wagons, of course, but with such small horses… I don't think it's impressive enough. It makes me look like a load of hay being pulled around, wouldn't you say?"

"I don't think anyone would ever think of you in such a way, my Lord." Joshua said.

"Perhaps you wouldn't." The Maestro told him. "But you're an intelligent man. Intelligent enough to give me respect. Not everyone is that intelligent. They need to be impressed. I need your help with that."

"I'll give you anything you wish. The entire resources of the Zoo are at your disposal, if you wish it."

"Obviously." The Maestro said in a sneering voice. "Since I'm the one providing all the food for your animals. My minister tells me that you no longer have any elephants at the zoo, is that correct?"

"Yes. Forgive me, my lord." Aster had seen pictures of elephants in her father's books. Elephants obviously would have been strong enough to bear the Maestro's weight, and no doubt the sight of the Maestro riding one would have been highly impressive. "After the war… the first zookeeper had no way of knowing that you were going to build Dystopia and provide for us. Elephants require a great deal of food, and there simply wasn't enough. They were starving. The first zookeeper made the decision to put them down and feed them to the tigers and other meat eaters. He had to choose between saving them, or saving most of the other species here. I apologize if you are angered at his decision, my Lord."

"I'm disappointed, but there's nothing to be done about it. However, I had a different thought in mind. Horses pulling me in a chariot would not be impressive. I'd look like a load of hay. And a load of hay in a goat cart, at that. But I think some other creature pulling a chariot would be more impressive. A pair of tigers, perhaps. I've know you have tigers here, at the zoo. I've seen them. I'm sure they can be trained to do something as simple as pulling a chariot. I've seen them jumping through hoops of fire, back before the War."

The zookeeper's eyes widened. Tigers were probably the most dangerous animals in the zoo, and he generally tried to keep as far away from them as possible, unless they had been sedated with opium. About the only thing he had trained them to do was to go in the smaller cage in the back of their enclosure, when he needed to clean up after them. Still, the fact that they could be trained to do that showed that they _could _be trained. And he had read about the numerous complex tricks that circus tigers had learned to do, before the war.

Still… perhaps there was a way to make things less dangerous for himself.

"Do you think…" Joshua's voice was tremulous. "Perhaps you could help me with the training? It would make things far easier, the tigers could never hurt you, my Lord."

"What do you think I am, one of your hirelings?" The Maestro was visibly annoyed, his breath hissing over large, yellowed teeth. "I'm the ruler of this city, Joshua. You serve me, not the other way around. I have far more important things to do with my time than spend it in a dirty cage full of animals, like that ugly daughter of yours over there."

The Maestro pointed one finger violently towards where Aster was still futilely trying to hide in the shadow of a tree, dashing any hopes her father might have had that the Maestro had forgotten her existence.

"I'm sorry." Aster's father bowed very low again, getting onto his knees and his head scraping the ground. "I'm sure I will be able to manage without your presence. I have several books on the subject of training animals that I am sure will be adequate. Would a matched pair of neutered males, brothers, perhaps, be to your liking, my Lord?"

The thought of nearly identical tigers seemed to please the Maestro, and he nodded. Relieved at having pleased the Maestro, Aster's father decided to make a few more requests from him.

"There are a few things I will need. A supply of fresh meat, the best cuts. To serve as a reward for the animals when I am training them. One of the electrified whips I've seen your guards with at times, to protect myself and punish them. A decent quantity of opium, in case I need to sedate the tigers. Some of your old clothes."

"My clothes?" The Maestro did not understand the last request, and hated anything he did not understand. "Whatever for? I'm warning you, if you are planning some sort of treachery..."

"It's for nothing bad, my lord. It's just that I wish to train the tigers to obey YOU. As you will not be here, the next best thing is to make myself smell like you, by wearing some of your old clothing. The dirtier and sweatier, the better."

The Maestro laughed loudly at this, his chuckles making the inside of Aster's stomach shake. "I hardly think my old clothing will fit you, Joshua."

"The fit is unimportant. I can simply drape the clothing, or pieces from it, over myself. The important thing is for the tigers to get used to your scent… and obeying it."

"I have some ripped garments you can have. Is there anything else?"

"A chariot. Of approximately the same size and weight you intend to use."

"So you can teach them to pull it. Very good. How long do you think it will take to train them?"

"I don't know, my Lord. I've never done anything like this, before. I think perhaps no more than a few months. If you could loan me one of your stablemen, who trains horses, that may be of some help. Consulting with him may give me some ideas as to how to proceed. Tigers are far different than horses, though. Horses generally don't try to eat you."

"A few months seems reasonable. And I will loan you my stable master - who will also be reporting your progress to me. I warn you, fail me, and I'll cut off all the food to your precious zoo, Joshua."

"I will not fail, my Lord." Joshua was not certain he could keep the promise, but he would stay up nights trying!

The Maestro seemed satisfied, and walked out of the zoo, his servants and women scurrying to keep up with his long strides.

Joshua stood where he was, partly slumped over in relief and holding onto the fence to support himself. Training a tiger. My God, had the Maestro gone mad? Those things were man-eaters, given the opportunity. It would have been easier if he could have started with a pair of cubs, but the Maestro was an impatient, petulant child. He would not want to wait years for results. Hell, he was lucky that the Maestro was willing to wait a few months!

He gestured for Aster to come out of the pasture. "Grind up some opium and get the large table in the operating room prepared. I need to go get the narrow wagon and some men to help me with the tigers. Don't spread the sheets out, yet. Wait until I come back."

Aster nodded and went to the Zoo's medical building, where they kept what few drugs they had. They were kept in large, dark jars with rubber rings around the lids to seal them tight. The opium came in dark brown balls, about the size of a grape, that were a little sticky in a way that reminded her of the blobs of resiney sap that sometimes dripped from pine trees. The blobs got hard on the outside with age, and had to be ground up to soften them, and formed into smaller balls, before they could be used. They were administered rectally, and her father said that being softer increased the rate at which they were absorbed, as did forming them into smaller balls, which increased the surface area. Aster had understood the first concept easily enough, soft candy was easier to chew than hard candy, but why the same amount in smaller balls would make a difference or what 'surface area' was confused her, until her father showed her the math behind it, and had her cut out large squares and smaller squares from a big burdock leaf (paper was too valuable to waste cutting up) and measuring their sides with a ruler until she grasped the concept.

Preparing the opium took only a few minutes. Preparing the large table in the operating room took far longer. The table was big enough for a tiger, or perhaps even the Maestro himself, to lie on. Probably it wasn't big enough for an elephant, if they had still had any. She asked her father once if the Zoo had ever done operations on elephants before the War, but he wasn't sure. He said elephants were so large, that a surgeon likely would have actually had to climb inside it to do any sort of complex surgery, and he wasn't sure how that could be done. Or even if it had been done. Or if it had, perhaps the people before the war had had some way of doing it that he didn't know about.

Still, there was lots of work to do, preparing the large table. First, Aster had to pour pails of water into one old kitchen pot and several large sawn off metal barrels that were on a thick grating over an open fireplace, carefully arrange wood on the fireplace, and light it. The fireplace was set into a wall that was obviously not part of the original construction of the operating room. The other walls were made out of smooth pre-War plaster, but the wall with the fireplace was made out of crude bricks. It would have been obvious to someone from before the war that a fourth wall had been torn down at some point, and this new addition added, but to Aster, it was just the usual way many buildings were in the Zoo, a mixture of old and new, and she didn't really think about it.

It would take some time for the water to come to a boil, so once the wood was burning, she opened a large cupboard and took out some stained, yellowing sheets. It was obvious from their fine weave that they were made before the War. The few attempts at homespun cloth that were for sale in Dystopia were crude stuff that was full of pilled fibers and tore easily. The stains didn't matter, anyways. The boiling water would kill any bacteria on them. Aster threw the sheets into some of the barrels of water, then got out a case full of surgical instruments and put them all into the old kitchen pot.

Then Aster got out a large plastic container that had the words 'Wood Alcohol' printed neatly on it in black letters. Below that, in red paint, was written 'poison', and below that (also in red paint) was a picture of a skull and crossbones. Her father said that wood alcohol was different from grain alcohol. He had even shown her in a book a picture of what he said were the two different molecules (also called Methanol and Ethanol, which Aster kept getting mixed up). The two molecules looked very similar, the only difference was that the one you could drink (ethanol or grain alcohol) had three extra 'atoms', one big carbon atom and two little hydrogen atoms stuck out to the side, like a person with two extra arms or something. Aster didn't understand why just a couple tiny old atoms should make the difference between killing you and not killing you, but her father said it was true, and proved it by killing a rat by squirting wood alcohol down it's throat with a syringe. He had some of the men he hired to work at the zoo watch as well, and warned them to never get into the wood alcohol to get drunk. It would first make you blind, then kill you. It was for fuel, and sterilizing things, not partying. With your mother, or anyone else. Which Aster guessed meant the same thing as getting drunk.

Her father then had gone on to tell Aster and his workers that when he was a boy, a man who had been working at the zoo had not believed the warnings of _his_ father about the wood alcohol and had drunk it anyways, because his father hadn't thought to show the workers then what happened by feeding the wood alcohol to a rat, and the man thought his father was lying and just wanted to keep the alcohol to get drunk with himself. They found him dead the next morning, in a pool of alcohol, vomit, and blood.

Between all her father's dire warnings, and the demonstration with the rat, the workers at the zoo seemed to grasp that drinking the wood alcohol was a bad idea, and left it alone. Which meant that there was always plenty for wiping off cuts, or the operating tables, as Aster was doing now. She poured a little of the alcohol onto an old rag, and wiped the operating table off on all sides, wiped off the thick leather restraints and their buckles, carefully poking one twisted corner of the rag into each hole on the leather straps, wiped off a large, shallow pan that fitted on one side of the table, then wiped the area on the floor as well. When she was done with that, she did it again. Then a third time. It wasn't as if they were short of wood alchohol. The stuff was cheap, compared to the type you could drink, and there were ten other five gallon containers in the cupboard that Aster didn't even need to open. Aster had asked her father once if he knew why one type of alcohol was safe to drink and the other wasn't, when the pictures of the molecules looked so different, but he said he didn't know. He said that knowing why was an old science called 'Biochemistry' that had been forgotten after the war. Maybe there were still books about it, but what good would they do? All you really needed to know in these times was not to drink the wood alcohol like a dummy.

By that time the water in the barrels with the sheets was boiling. Her father had said not to spread them out, yet, so Aster just used some metal tongs to pull some of the wood off the fire, letting the barrels just simmer while she waited for him.

He came back sooner than she thought, only in a little over half an hour. After checking over the operating room, her father measured out some of the opium Aster had ground up, folded it into a burdock leaf and took it with him. "I'll be back again, soon, with one of the tigers Keep those sheets and instruments simmering."

Aster did as told, occasionally putting another log on the fire. Sure enough, in less than an hour her father came back, leading several men who were pulling a long, narrow wagon. On top of the wagon was a large tiger, obviously sedated from being fed opium. One of his eyes opened a slight crack, revealing shining green and yellow, then closed again. They came in through the door, the wagon just barely fitting and scraping against the sides.

"Quick. Help me get the sheets on, Aster." The men did not know the proper procedure for keeping the sheets sterile. Or at least as sterile as was possible, but Aster did. She and her father each took a pair of tongs, held it in the bare flames of the fire for a few moments, then used them to fish sheets out of the barrels of boiling water, as if they had been dumplings. Still using the tongs – using their bare hands would have burned them and contaminated the sheets, the spread the large cloths out onto the metal table as best they could. The spread out sheets cooled quickly, and Aster's father tested one corner of it with a finger after a few moments. He nodded. They were no longer hot enough to burn.

He handed the large container of wood alcohol to his men and told them to wipe it on their hands and arms up to their elbows. They did so quickly, and he put the alcohol to one side for the moment.

"Get him in here and roll him onto the table. Aster, you pour some of the boiling water into the cooling pan." Ordered her father. Aster took the cooling pan from where it fitted on the operating table, brought it over to the fireplace, and dipped poured water into it from one of the barrels ful of sheets. The men were obviously nervous about being near an uncaged tiger, even such an obviously sedated one, and hastened to obey. Partly lifting, and partly rolling, they got the tiger onto the operating table, then helped shift the huge animal's body around, until Aster's father was able to get the restraints around it's body, limbs, and head in several places. The tiger was well and truly bound, even if it woke up in an instant, it wouldn't be able to claw or even open it's mouth, or prevent them from re-sedating it by administering more opium rectally.

Her father checked all the straps, making sure they were tight, and none were worn, then finally nodded. "Alright. Everyone out. But wait outside. I'll need your help when I'm done getting this one back to the cage, and bringing in the next one."

The men left, and Aster knew what happened next. She went over to the fire. "What do you need, first?"

"Razor. " Aster took a smaller pair of tongs, stuck them in the fire the way she had with the ones they used for the sheets, and fished the razor out of the boiling water and put it into the cooling pan. The water in it was only lukewarm by now, and after a few moments, the razor was safe to touch. Her father began shaving the tiger around it's crotch, along it's penis and near it. Aster wasn't sure what he was doing.

"Are you going to try to artificially inseminate one of the females." She knew that was wrong, while she said it. Collecting sperm wouldn't have required surgery.

"No, I'm going to castrate it. Remove it's testicles."

Aster frowned. "What for? We won't be able to breed it."

"No, we won't." Her father looked unhappy at the thought. "But we wouldn't be able to, anyways. Once I train them and give them to the Maestro, I doubt he's going to loan them back to us for breeding purposes."

"Well, if the Maestro's taking them anyways, why go to all this trouble?" Preparing the operating room was always a lot of work. " Why not just train them and give them to him?"

"Because castration not only prevents breeding, it reduces aggression in male animals. It'll make them easier and safer to train. More obedient."

"Is that why they sometimes castrate horses? To make them more obedient?"

"Yes, although a lot of them die from infection. Most people aren't able to follow proper sterilization procedures in these times." Her father frowned. Another new addition to the building had been the removal of part of the roof, and replacing it with glass from the bird enclosures, which were now mostly empty. Lightbulbs were nearly impossible to get, so all surgery was performed during the day. But the sun didn't stand still, and was now off to one side of the operating table.

"Get the mirror." He told Aster. She knew immediately what the problem was, and rolled a large standing mirror from one corner, and angled it where it would reflect the sunlight back towards where her father needed to operate. He nodded approvingly. "Scalpel."

Aster used the tongs to get the scalpel out of the pot of boiling water and dropped it into the cooling pan. Her father waited a few moments, then took the scalpel and cut into the tiger's scrotum. Aster thought about what her father had said, castration making animals less violent and more obedient.

"Is that why the Maestro has castrated people… the eunuchs… in his palace? Because he wants them to be less violent and more obedient?"

"Among other reasons." Her father didn't feel like explaining to a child as young as Aster that the Maestro's real concern was probably jealousy of various sorts. Eunuchs were not a threat to what he saw as his 'rights' regarding the women he kept in his palace. He cut deeper, and accidentally nicked a small artery. "Damn it!" He took one corner of the sheet and used it to sop up some of the blood.

"Get me a small clip. And heat a 1/16 inch stainless steel probe red hot on one end, and give it to me."

Aster got the small clip, and after cooling it for a moment, her father used it to pinch off the bleeding. Aster heated the probe and brought it quickly and carefully to her father, who used it to burn the blood vessel shut. Blood vessels could be sewn, of course, but cauterizing them was easier, especially if they were small, or you were performing an amputation, anyways. Which castration was a form of. And the fine magnifying tools to perform miracles like microsurgery, that could re-attach lost body parts had been lost to time and the War.

Her father cut through the ligaments and blood vessels that attached the tiger's testicles to the rest of it's body, and finally freed one of them. He made Aster watch as he cauterized all the veins and arteries. Someday she would need to know how to do that. He handed her one of the testicles.

"Go put that in salt water. I know some Chinese people who'll pay a lot for it." Aster snorted. She was slightly familiar with the tradition medical beliefs of Chinese people, and not highly impressed by them, despite the fact that such beliefs were becoming more popular in Dystopia as more technology, drugs, and tools became harder to get. Nevertheless, their money was as good as anyone else's, and if they wanted to pay a clanking fortune for tiger balls, more the fool them. The money would buy food for the other animals.

There was salt in the operating room, of course. Aster got a jar of water, and poured in a generous amount of salt, then dropped the egg shaped testicle into it. She did the same with the other one, then had to watch again as her father rinsed the area where he had operated with wood alcohol and stitched the tiger's scrotum shut.

"You know, I don't understand why the Maestro would need for people to be less violent and more obedient." Aster said, as her father finished the last few stitches. "It's not like he can be afraid of them. They can't hurt him. Maybe someone should castrate him. If it calms him down. He seems mad all the time. I didn't like the way he acted when he was here before."

"What?!" Her father dropped the needle, and seized Aster by the shoulder, shaking her violently. He pulled her nearly entirely across the limp tiger, and she was forced to hold herself up against the sides of the table to avoid touching the suddenly very terrible emasculating wound. "Don't ever say that! Never again, you hear? Not to anyone!"

"Why? What did I say?" Aster's mouth gaped open. Her father released her, and she slid down carefully to the floor.

"The Maestro would kill you for saying that. You understand?"

"No. Why?"

Her father waved one hand helplessly. "People… aren't animals. If you castrate an animal, it calms them down. Animals don't have much sense of time. They don't remember the past very well. Or have very many hopes or fears for the future. When you castrate an animal, they accept it. They don't remember what it was like before being castrated, or think about what it might be like if they hadn't been. People are different… if you castrate a man, he'll be furious. Even if you do it when he's a boy, before he's ever had sex, he'll know what he lost. Know that he'll never have sex again. Which you're old enough by now to know that people, especially men, enjoy a lot more than animals. Most men will risk or pay almost anything to get sex, they like it that much. If you take that away from a man, probably he'll try to kill you. And someone as strong as the Maestro _will_ kill you. Just for even suggesting it. It's something all men are afraid of. Even him."

"Were the eunuchs in his palace afraid before he castrated them?"

"Probably. Yes. But they weren't given a choice. Or not much of one. That or death. And some men even actually prefer death, to that."

"It seems pretty mean for the Maestro to do that to them, then. If he's afraid of it himself. Doesn't he think other people are afraid?" Aster thought how afraid her father had seemed when the Maestro had held his head in two deadly fingers.

"He doesn't care. For a lot of people… morality is only about being punished. What consequences there might be for their actions. And nobody can punish the Maestro. So he doesn't care what he does, or who he hurts. He doesn't have any empathy. Understand?"

Aster thought about it. Her father had once told her that she had a lot of 'empathy' which let you understand how other people or animals felt, even if you didn't feel that way yourself, and it was why she would be a great Zookeeper someday. He told her it was a sign of being grown up. Which apparently the Maestro wasn't. "That's why you said once that he was like a little boy. Little kids don't care how other people feel, and they don't behave unless you spank them."

"Yes. Except nobody is strong enough to 'spank' the Maestro. And it takes a very great man to be moral, without fear of punishment. The Maestro is strong, but he isn't great. That's one reason why he doesn't get respect. Even these tigers…" He waved his hand at the prone beast. "Won't get him respect. Respect is like love, in a way. Perhaps it's even a form of love. It has to be earned, and freely given. It can never be stolen with fear and force."

"Why bother training them, then? If they won't get him the respect he wants?"

Her father smiled sadly. "They'll get him fear. At least for a while. He'll be happy with that. He can't really tell the difference that much, anyways."

Her father cleaned up the first tiger, and called in some of his workers to take it out to a small cage to recover. He and Aster operated on the second tiger in near silence. There was little to say, the operation was nearly identical to the first one, and Aster was starting to think that she did not like the Maestro very much.


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5. The Tiger Trainer.

The two castrated tigers were kept in small cages, with plenty of clean straw on the bottom, to recover from what was actually very minor surgery. There was no infection, or other complications, despite the fact that the operating room was actually far from sterile. No pre-war surgeon or hospital would have dared surgery on a human in such a place. But other than what might have existed in the Maestro's palace, it was actually the best Dystopia had to offer. Aster's father had told her several times that the rate of infection from surgery at the zoo among animals was lower than that which any doctors for humans (except maybe those in the Maestro's palace) could boast of. They were the best because he and the zookeepers who had come before him had damn well busted their asses, and bowed and scraped to the Maestro to keep it the best. They did it because they cared about the animals, not because they had any great love for the Maestro.

Aster's father took the opportunity to feed the tigers with the best cuts of meat in the zoo, as often as they would accept it. The protein would help them heal from the surgery, and as he told Aster: "Any tiger, no matter how tame you think it is, is only about three meals away from becoming a maneater. Make that only one meal, if it hasn't been tamed."If the tigers were full, and kept full, and furthermore regarded him as the _source_ of good meals, rather than _being_ a good meal himself, they'd be less likely to attack him when he trained them. Hopefully. Tigers, like all felines, had an instinct to attack things just for the fun of it. He talked to the tigers in a quiet voice as he fed them, taking care to keep far enough away from the cage that they couldn't reach a paw through the bars and snag any part of his body or clothing with their claws.

The second day after Aster had helped her father with the surgery on the tigers, he left the zoo late one morning after making sure the animals were fed and cleaned up after for the day. He returned to his house a few hours later, just as Aster was finishing eating the lunch she had made for herself and Thumb, carrying several thick books. He set them down the table and helped himself to the rabbit stew and boiled dried apples that Aster had cooked. Aster finished her meal quickly and looked at the books, knowing her father wouldn't mind. One had a lot of pictures, of two men, and some tigers. It seemed to be about two men called 'Siegfried and Roy' (Aster wasn't sure if that was their first or last names) who had trained white tigers. That was strange to her. All the tigers in the zoo were orange and black, not white. Well, probably white tigers had all died in the War like a lot of other animals. The other books were thicker, didn't have very many pictures, and reminded her of some of her father's books that she didn't quite understand yet. They were all written by someone called 'B.F' Skinner'. Aster thumbed through the books. There were a couple pictures of rats, but none of tigers. She didn't know what use the books were, but they must be useful, or her father wouldn't have gotten them. Her father was the smartest man she knew. Hell, a lot of other men in Dystopia couldn't even read.

The Maestro was true to his word, in supplying them with what they needed. The day after her father had gotten the books from the library, a wagon came, loaded with the things her father had asked for. Several large jars of opium. A large basket with several articles of the Maestro's old clothes (which Aster thought smelled very badly, like one of the Zoo's apes after several hot days). Not merely one, but two electrified whips.

The Maestro's stablemaster came with the wagon, as well. His name was Daniel Wolfkiller. He had skin the color of tan leather and greasy black hair that he kept in a long braid down his back. A long, curved scar marred one side of his face, going across one cheek and up into his hairline. Aster wondered where it had come from.

"How did you get that?" She asked him.

"Horse kicked me." His eyes were squinted and slightly slanted like the Chinese people who would probably pay a lot for the preserved tiger testicles.

"Were you trying to tame it?" Aster asked him.

"The proper term would be 'break it." The stablemaster said. "And no. I was trying to… milk it, actually."

One of the men on the wagon snorted back some laughter, and Wolfkiller glared furiously at him.

"What's so funny?" Aster wondered.

"He was trying to 'milk' a stallion." The snorts became full fledged laughter.

Aster understood the joke. "Oh, you were trying to collect from it for artificial insemination."

Wolfkiller seemed surprised. "You know about that?"

"We have to do it a lot at the Zoo. Sometimes I do it with the smaller animals." Said Aster. "To try to keep the bloodlines from becoming too inbred."

The stablemaster didn't seem to approve. He shot a series of sour looks at the man on the wagon, at Aster's father, and back at Aster. "A little girl like you shouldn't be knowing about such things."

"I'm twelve." Aster stretched herself up to the limits of her not very impressive height. "And I need to know all about the Zoo. I'm to be zookeeper someday."

"Twelve…well." He seemed to think about that. "You're short. You look younger."

"Everyone says that."

"Well, perhaps you'll grow taller." Wolfkiller said as if that somehow settled the matter. "Just make sure that you keep out of the way when your father and I are working with the Tigers. They are not 'small animals' for little girls to be around. They're dangerous. I wouldn't even be here, if I had a choice in it."

Obviously the Maestro was the reason for him not having a 'choice' in helping her father train the tigers."Father said the same thing, but he wants me to watch. And to read the books he got from the Library. He says I may need to train animals someday, so I should learn as much as I can."

"Watch all you want. But keep out of my way."

Wolfkiller went then, to help her father and the other men unload the wagon. They put away the supplies, some in Aster's house, some in a large empty cage. Her father pointed to the cage. "That's where Daniel and I will be training the tigers. I'll bring a stool outside for you to watch us, when the time comes. But you make sure not to make a peep, you hear. No matter what happens. Any distraction, any noise at the wrong time, could make a good situation bad, or a bad situation worse."

Aster frowned. "Are the tigers very dangerous? I thought the operation was supposed to make them safe."

Her father shook his head. "No tiger is ever 'safe'. Not unless it's drugged or dead, and I wouldn't even trust 'drugged' very far. Being castrated makes it _slightly_ less dangerous. Not much less dangerous. But some. And I'll take what I can get."

He glanced over at Daniel Wolfkiller, who was pulling a large, battered wooden trunk off the wagon. "Mister Wolfkiller is going to be staying in the house with us, in one of the empty bedrooms. You'll need to make sure to knock on the bathroom door, in case he's in there. Cook extra food at mealtimes for him. Keep out of his bedroom, and out of his things. On laundry day, ask him if there's anything he needs washed. Answer any questions he has, politely. Otherwise, try not to talk to him too much. He's not the talkative sort."

Aster nodded. Wolfkiller was somewhat scary. Not like the men at the Zoo. She thought about why. She used to be a little scared of the men who worked at the Zoo, but not for the past few years. Lately she got on with them well. In fact, they usually did what she said, when her father wasn't around. It was strange, now that she thought about it. Big men doing what a short girl like her said. Maybe that was what her father meant by 'respect'. But he also said respect had to be earned. How had she earned it? By knowing about the zoo? But that was just her job, what she was supposed to do.

Well, whatever it was, she would just keep out of Wolfkiller's way. Maybe she would earn his 'respect' and maybe not. It didn't really matter, hopefully the tigers would be trained soon enough and he would be gone back to the Maestro's stables, or wherever it was he had come from.

For the next few days, Aster's father studied the books he had gotten from the Library. He gave some of them to Daniel Wolfkiller, but the scarred man was not as good a reader as her father was. In fact, he wasn't even as good a reader as Aster was. One afternoon Aster's father was out somewhere in the Zoo, and Wolfkiller was getting very angry about some words in the book by B.F. Skinner that he didn't understand.

"What the hell is 'positive reinforcement?" He slammed the book to the table.

"Let me look." Before the man could object, Aster looked at the paragraph he had been reading. She wasn't sure, so she read a few paragraphs before it, then after it. Within a minute, she understood.

"It's like a reward. For the animal doing what you want. It's 'positive' because it's good. I'm not sure if that means the reward is good, or the animal doing what you want is good. And it's reinforcement, because it 'reinforces' the behavior. It gets the animal to keep doing what you want it to do."

"Hmm." The older man picked up the book and re-read the part that had puzzled him. "I suppose that makes sense. This bloody book is way above my head, though. I don't know what your father expects of me, I break bloody horses, I'm not a damned college professor or librarian. I think he's going to have to read most of these and translate them for me."

He put the book down and regarded Aster. "But you didn't have any trouble with that. Did you? Or not much, at least. Smart little short thing, aren't you?"

"I don't know." For most of her life, Aster had thought that learning came as easily to most people as it did to her, and still had a hard time understanding why it didn't. The fact that it did not was actually quite bizaare to her at her age, as if she were to discover one day that everyone else had blue blood, and hers was the only blood that was red. "I guess I am. I have to be smart and know a lot of things if I'm to be Zookeeper someday."

"Take my advice." Wolfkiller told her. "Keep it under your hat."

"My hat?" Aster touched her head. She wasn't even wearing a hat. "I don't understand."

"I mean, don't show off how smart you are. Which you seem to like to do. Don't let most people know it."

"I don't understand." Aster frowned. "Father says being smart is good. Why shouldn't people know about it?"

"Two reasons." Wolfkiller leaned back slightly in a chair. "Firstly, they'll be jealous. They'll hate you for it. Secondly, being smart can be a weapon, just like being strong or fast. And it's a better weapon if people don't know you have it. If someone is your enemy, let them think they have tricked you. Until they find out you've tricked them. If you let them think they've tricked you, they won't go around trying to find new tricks, that actually might really trick you."

That made sense. Aster cleaned up the table and read through some of the books that the stablemaster wasn't using. The words were hard, and she often had to look them up in the book's glossary, or the big dictionary on her father's shelf, or simply re-read what was written several times until it made sense.

The next day, her father and Daniel Wolfkiller began training the tigers. They both wore oddly colored sleeveless ponchos, cut from the Maestro's old clothing and tied around their waists, so that the tigers would get used to the Maestro's scent. Several men stood just outside the large cage where they worked, ready to go in if something went drastically wrong. Like one or both of the tigers trying to kill either the zookeeper or the Maestro's stablemaster. Aster sat quietly on her stool, 6 feet outside the cage, making no sudden noises or movements as her father had told her. Among other items that Wolfkiller had brought with him from the stables were several bridles and harnesses, used for horses that pulled plows. But a tiger's head was proportioned differently than a horses, it was shorter and wider, and didn't have a space between the teeth for a bit. Her father and Wolfkiller argued over this for a short while. Wolfkiller wanted her father to sedate the tigers again, and pull their teeth. Preferably all of them, but at least a few of them, so they would take a bit in their mouths. And declaw them as well, while he was at it.

Her father refused all of the suggestions. The Maestro would not be pleased by a toothless or clawless tiger, he insisted. Nor was removing just a few teeth for a bit a good idea either It would eventually result in the other teeth shifting, causing pain for the tiger, and most likely eventually causing the loss of more teeth. Her father would distract the tigers with a chunk of meat and quickly take various measurements with a cloth strip marked with inches, and he and Wolfkiller would cut apart and rivet back together the bridles. Eventually, they came up with something that fit over the tiger's heads. It had a ring on either side where reins could be attached, but for now, the reins were left off.

It seemed like her father and the Wolfkiller argued about almost everything. Wolfkiller said he had been training animals for nearly 40 years, since he was a boy younger than the Zookeepers 'peculiar daughter'. Her father said that those animals were horses and asses, and that Wolfkiller knew nothing about tigers, because they were meat eaters. Wolfkiller said dogs were meat eaters, too, and he had no problem training them. Her father just shook his head and told Wolfkiller that he didn't have time to explain the 'genetics of domestication' to him, and to try going to sleep in the same room with a wolf if he was too dumb to tell the difference.

There was more argument about the electrified whips. After reading some of the books about the two men, Siegfried and Roy, her father told Wolfkiller that the two famous pre-War tiger trainers had actually used 'fire extinguishers' to control the tigers, which didn't really hurt them. Unfortunately, all the pre-War fire extinguishers had long since leaked out (or maybe it had dried out, Aster wasn't sure) whatever it was that had been inside them, and there was no way to refill them or to make new fire extinguishers. But as the two tiger trainers, as well as some other books that Aster's father had gotten from the Library on the subject warned about hurting the tigers, as doing so would make them angry, and likely to attack you for hurting them, he wanted the electrified whips put on the lowest setting. "So they'll just tingle." He told Wolfkiller.

Of course the horse trainer disagreed. He said he had managed to understand a little of the books by B.F. Skinner, and they talked about not only 'positive reinforcement' – or rewards, but 'negative reinforcement' – or punishments. He felt the tigers needed to be punished if they did something wrong. "You can't train an animal without whipping it."

"A tiger isn't a horse or a donkey." Her father insisted. "Nor is it one of Skinner's rats. You piss it off, and it'll have your head for breakfast and your kidneys for lunch."

"It'll take longer to train them, without punishing them." Wolfkiller warned.

"I don't care. It'll take real long if I'm dead. Which is what your suggestion will get me, and I've no intention of ending up that way, thank you very much." He sniffed in annoyance.

Eventually, they ended up doing things the way Aster's father wanted. The electrified whips were turned down to their lowest setting. Aster's father started getting the tigers used to wearing the harnesses by giving them food, and also started training them to follow directions, by using tongs to hold the food either in front of them, or to one side, and giving the commands: "Gee", "Haw", and "Mush". He did this many times, then started giving the commands _before_ he held out the food in the tongs, and would let the tigers have the chunks of meat only if they turned in the proper direction when he said "Gee" or "Haw", or went forward when he said "Mush".

This went on for a few days, and after a while Aster's father would only give the tigers chunks of meat _sometimes_ when they followed the commands correctly. This was according to the book by B.F. Skinner and was called intermittent reinforcement. Aster sounded out the long words and read about them. The books said that animals learned better to do what you wanted if you only _sometimes_ gave them the reward. And they shouldn't know which times they were going to get it, and which they weren't. That way they would always do what you wanted and hope that _this _time they would get the reward. For a change, the Wolfkiller actually agreed with the intermittent reinforcement, although he said he didn't know what it was called, but it was much what he did with horses. At least when he wasn't whipping them.

Sometimes the tigers wouldn't do what Aster's father and the Wolfkiller wanted them to do, and would growl and raise their paws threateningly, despite being tingled with the whips, and more than once Aster had to warn the Wolfkiller not to turn up the setting on his whip. Most of the time, though, they seemed to cooperate. Aster thought at first it was maybe because her father was making sure they were fed all the time, but it seemed more than that. Even when the other tigers were fed, they didn't seem quite as lazy and cooperative, and paced and growled and lot more. Perhaps it was the castration operation she and her father had done. Her father had mentioned that it would make them less violent and more cooperative. Or at least slightly so. Watching them, it seemed to Aster that it did more than that. Or perhaps something else, parallel to that. It seemed to make them less tiger-like. A little bit.

It was almost sad in a way. Aster wondered about the eunuchs in the Maestro's palace. If castration made tigers less tiger-like, did it make people less people-like? People didn't bite and growl like the tigers. Or did they? She thought about her father when he had to bow before the Maestro. He seemed smaller, then, although it wasn't his fault. The Maestro was the strongest one there was. Stronger than everyone else in Dystopia put together. Everyone had to do what the Maestro said, or he'd kill them. Her father didn't act like that at any other time. He certainly wasn't afraid of Wolfkiller, even though Aster was. A little bit. And he got into the cage with the tigers. So maybe people did bite and growl, in their own ways. It would not be much of a person, especially a man, who cringed all the time, in front of every other person alive.

In the next few days, her father and Daniel Wolfkiller put together some oval shaped objects made of fitted wood padded with leather and cloth. It went over the tiger's heads and around their chests, and fastened tightly to them with several straps. One of the tigers tried to claw at her father the first time he tried to put it on them, so he had to get them used to it a little at a time. First he put on just the round oval part, giving them pieces of meat to reward them for wearing it. Then he put the straps on them, loosely at first, gradually tightening them over a period of a few days, until the tigers were wearing both bridle and harness the way her father wanted them to.

They had only just started, of course. Once the tigers were used to the bridle and harness, and would walk (or run) straight, right, or left, they had to get used to being strapped together, the way they would be when pulling the chariot. This meant that her father had to walk near one tiger, and Wolfkiller (complaining loudly about the matter to whoever would listen or just the air if no-one was around) would have to walk near the other, sometimes gently pushing it from in front or behind, or in one direction or the other. Wolfkiller got a nasty claw across the back of his arm one day from one of the tigers. Her father saw that happen.

"Don't scream." He said immediately in a low voice. "And don't run away. And don't you _dare _whip it. Walk out of the cage, slowly."

Wolfkiller looked furiously angry, but did what her father said. He sat the Maestro's stableman down, and got out a small wooden box with cloth bandages and a bottle of wood alcohol.

"Why'd you tell me not to scream. Or whip the bloody damned thing for clawing me." Wolfkiller said, as her father treated his cut.

"Prey screams, and runs away." Her father said. "Tigers play rough. I've told you that before, Wolfkiller. They're not horses or donkeys. Their play is practice for the hunt. And if you act like prey, they'll hunt you."

"I'm having a hard time understanding why the Maestro came up with this idea." Wolfkiller spat on the ground. "Those things are nearly impossible to control. He's not going to like it when they take a chunk out of him."

The Zookeeper shook his head. "They'll do about as much damage to him as a kitten could do to you or me. I doubt he'll care, and the tigers are smart enough to submit to someone as strong as him. It isn't him I'm worried about."

"Why Joshua." Wolfkiller used his first name sarcastically. He waved his bandaged arm in the air. "I didn't know you cared. Do you think it'll have to be amputated."

"That's nothing." Her father dismissed the injury, which seemed very bad to Aster's young eyes. There had been a lot of blood. At least it seemed so to her. In reality, there had been only a few ounces of it, but Aster's standard of measurement was based on her childhood splinters, scraped knees, and fingers caught in doorways.

Getting the tigers to stay and move together proved to be the hardest part of training them. Despite being bribed with chunks of meat, and tingled (only on rare occasions) with the whips when they misbehaved badly, they did not seem to grasp the idea of staying and moving together. They wanted to either move apart, or attack one another, or attack her father and Wolfkiller. Or some combination of all three misbehaviors. Her father and the horse trainer kept at it, trading ideas, such as only feeding the tigers when they were fastened together with the harness, so they learned to associate being together with Good Things. Eventually, the ferocious beasts learned to cooperate.

After that, it got simpler. Once the tigers learned to move together as a team, at least most of the time, Aster's father fastened the straps from their harness to a large board, and made them move together while pulling that. The weight confused them at first, and the tigers kept turning their heads to look at the board, but the two men training them kept making them go forward, then right, then left, and after a while the tigers seemed to forget about the weight they were dragging.

Eventually, the board got replaced by a larger board, then a board with wheels. Then a low box with wheels, then a higher box, and finally, after two months, both tigers would actually pull around the wooden chariot that the Maestro had given them for training purposes.

It was fall, now, and the leaves were turning colors. Aster was glad of the extra meat the Maestro was giving to the Zoo for the animals (though she still thought he was very mean for the way he treated her father and forced men to become eunuchs). They ate a lot of the meat themselves, of course (though they did not tell the Maestro that), and stew or thick soup with a lot of meat was just the thing for a cold fall night.

Aster was less afraid of Daniel Wolfkiller than she had been, though she still didn't like him very much. He got angry when he saw her reading thick books faster than he could, and would stiffly walk outside or into his room. Sometimes there were raisins or sugar missing, and Aster was sure that the Maestro's horse trainer had taken them. Which made no sense, as she would have given them to him if he had only asked. But maybe he didn't want to ask a girl like her for food. She also didn't like his braid. From what she could tell, he never took it out, even when he took a bath, and Aster once saw a bug crawling on it. She tried to sit farther away from Wolfkiller after that. She didn't want his bugs to get into her hair.

A few times, Wolfkiller would leave the Zoo, usually in the evening after he and her father were done training the tigers for the day. He would go to the market in town and usually bring back a couple bottles of liquor. Her father said nothing about this, since Wolfkiller only drank a little bit of it at a time, and only at night. Never during the day when he had to be alert to train the tigers. A few times, though, Wolfkiller came back with a woman, who from the way she was dressed, appeared to be one of the prostitutes from a nearby brothel. He would take her off into one of the empty rooms at the zoo, and they would both come back out a while later, Wolfkiller pressing money into the woman's hand, or down the front of her dress.

Thumb saw Wolfkiller bring the prostitutes to the zoo a few times. She asked their father about them at lunch one day. "Are those women Mr. Wolfkiller's friends? Do they help him train horses for the Maestro?"

Aster and her father both choked on their lunch. After lunch, Aster saw her father go out by the darker man, and talk to him in an angry tone. After that, Aster still saw Wolfkiller bringing prostitutes to the Zoo, but he always brought them to a certain empty shed that was far away from their house, so Thumb didn't see them. Aster went into the shed one day, when she knew that Wolfkiller was busy helping her father with the tigers, and looked around. There were several blankets and pillows on the floor, a few full bottles of liquor, and several empty bottles. Aster took away an empty bottle. Bottles were valuable, and it gave her a smug feeling to steal something from Wolfkiller, whom she still didn't like very much. She was careful not to touch the blankets. She thought she had seen another bug in the dark braid that hung down his back the other night during supper, and for all she knew, there were bugs in the blankets.

She put the bottle on the window in her room, and admired the way the sun shined through the blue glass. Blue bottles were very rare. Then she hid it in the back of one of her drawers. Let the Maestro's stupid stablemaster wonder what had happened to his stupid bottle. If he even cared about bottles, other than drinking what was in them, that was. She would wait until he was done helping her father train the tigers, and then she would have the bottle on the window every day, if she wanted.

About that time, her father came up with something he wanted her to do.

"Aster." He said one day. "You've watched me and Daniel Wolfkiller training the tigers for a few months, now. And read most of the books I got on the subject. How much do you think you've learned about training animals."

"I don't know." Aster felt nervous. "I don't think I want to go in by the tigers, like you and Wolfkiller, if that's what you mean."

"Oh, goodness, no." Joshua reassured his daughter. "You're too young and too small. It's dangerous enough for grown men, like me and Daniel. It may be that someday the Maestro might want you to train a tiger. Or some other animal. But I'm sure you'll be a grown woman by then. And you're smart enough to get help, when you need it."

"Like Wolfkiller helps you? And the men from the zoo are outside the cage ready to help?"

"Exactly. You have learned a lot from watching." Her father nodded approvingly. "I want to see how well you can use what you've learned. I'd like you to take Stubs, that lynx we had to bottlefeed a few years ago, and teach him a trick. Something simple, like jumping through a hoop. See how fast you can teach him. Then after you've taught him, you can show me. Stubs is fairly tame, still. And he's too small to kill you."

Aster was excited over the project. She re-read all the books about Seigfried and Roy, and the ones by B.F. Skinner, and thought that it would be fairly easy to teach Stubs such a trick. She forgot about the bottle she had stolen, and her dislike for Daniel Wolfkiller and his dirty hair and dirty prostitutes.

The next day, she brought Stubs into a small cage, along with a bucket full of meat chunks. She had a hoop that she had made in a few minutes by twisting some raspberry runners into a big circle, and tying the ends together. She let Stubs sniff the hoop, but he didn't seem interested in it. He kept sniffing at the bucket of meat and trying to stick his nose into it.

"No!" Aster scolded. "Bad Stubs!" Not thinking, she gave him a hard swat on the nose. Stubs jumped up, hissed, then came back down and bit her on the hand. Hard!"

"Owee!" Red blood oozed over the punctures where Stub's teeth were sunk in. Aster tried to pull her hand away, but Stubs held on tight with his sharp teeth. Pulling made it hurt worse, and Aster was afraid that if she pulled too hard, she would make Stubs's teeth rip right through her hand. "Damn it! Lemme go, Stubs!"

Stubs did not seem inclined to 'let go', and instead growled angrily over his teeth at Aster. She stood there, feeling more stupid, than hurt. After the initial bit, the teeth didn't hurt that bad, if she didn't pull on them. Well, they still hurt some, but not as badly as when she had first been bitten. She didn't like it, though. What was she going to do, stand here all day with a lynx biting her hand? She didn't want to call for help, that was a baby thing to do and her father would be disappointed in her. He had thought she was smart enough to train Stubs, and that meant smart enough to figure out her own way out of this fix she was in.

Well, it had been keeping Stubs away from the meat that had gotten her into this fix. Maybe the meat was the answer. Using her left hand, she reached into the bucket of meat, and took out a piece. She held it near Stubs's nose, just above where his teeth were sunk into her hand. Stubs sniffed at the meat, but wouldn't let go of her hand. Instead, he tried pulling her whole hand upwards, towards the meat. That made the bite hurt worse, again.

"No, no. Bad Stubs. Owee! Not my hand!" Despite the pain of forcing her hand against the way Stubs wanted to pull it, she kept her hand in one place, and moved the meat away slowly, making sure that the lynx was keeping his eye on it. She tossed the meat gently, only a foot or so away. Stubs seemed torn between keeping his teeth sunk into her flesh, or satisfying his appetite. But he was a tame lynx, and after a few seconds, his stomach won out over his annoyance at having had his nose swatted.

Stubs snatched up the meat, and Aster looked at her hand. Not as bad as Wolfkiller's clawing from the tiger had been, but the twin sets of puncture wounds, one on top of, and one on the bottom of her hand were deep. For all she knew, they met in the middle. Puncture wounds were bad. They could get infected. Blood oozed from all four wounds made by the lynx's sharp canine teeth.

"Got to disinfect it." She got up, taking the bucket of meat with her. "You stay here, Stubs. I'll be back."

She closed the door to the cage quickly, before Stubs could sneak through, and went off to the Zoo's hospital, the same place where she had assisted her father in castrating the tigers. Stubs wasn't castrated, but she thought he was tame. After all, she and her father had bottlefed him. But maybe no predator was ever really tame, especially if you were mean to it and swatted it on the nose. She shouldn't have done that.

She had to walk past the very large cage where her father and Daniel Wolfkiller were training the tigers. They had gotten to the point where her father actually rode in the wooden chariot, and was pulling on the reins leading to the tiger's bridles as he called out the commands 'Gee', 'Haw', and 'Mush'. Wolfkiller was standing to one side of the cage, looking pleased that he was not the one who had to ride in the chariot, although as she went past, she heard him heckling her father with some comment to the effect that the zookeeper was the one who got to have all the fun and ride around, while poor Wolfkiller got stuck using his own two feet.

Just then, her father saw Aster's bleeding hand. "Halt!" he commanded the tigers, letting go of the tension on the reins. The two tigers stopped, and her father looked over at Aster.

"What happened to your hand."

"Stubs bit me." Aster admitted.

"Stubs? Her father raised his eyebrows. "That's not like him. What happened?"

"He tried to steal meat from the bucket, so I swatted him on the nose."

"That was a stupid thing to do, wasn't it?" her father didn't sound very sympathetic.

"Yeah." Aster's hand was starting to throb again, in the unseasonably warm autumn sun. "I thought you said Stubs wouldn't hurt me."

"I never said he wouldn't _hurt_ you." Now her father looked disappointed. "I said he was too small to _kill_ you. Any animal will try to hurt you, if you hurt it, first. Either that or run away. Why do you think I'm using the very lowest setting on the electric whips here, with the tigers? If I hurt them, they'll hurt me back, and they ARE big enough to kill me."

He shook his head. "Go get that disinfected. I've got a lot of work yet to do, this afternoon. The Maestro's getting impatient. When you're done, go back and try again with Stubs. Do better this time. Don't do the same stupid thing you did before."

Obviously. If you did the same stupid thing over and over again, you would get the same stupid result, over and over again. Aster had no desire to be bitten by Stubs again. That would be dumb. And it _hurt._

Aster went to the hospital, set her bucket of meat to one side, and brought over the wood alcohol, a pair of small metal bowlsome rolls of clean cloth bandages, and a wooden probe, strong and rough, but slender. She tore off a bit of the cloth bandage and wrapped it around the tip of the wooden probe. Then she poured about half an inch of the alcohol into the metal bowl and dipped the cloth wrapped tip into it. She bit her lip. The next part was going to hurt. Badly. Probably worse than the initial bite from Stubs had.

Biting her lip and the inside of her cheek against the pain, she pushed the soaked cloth into one of the punctures, as far as she could stand. She waited a moment, then forced it farther.

Damn bloody hell. She whimpered, her fingers clenching uncontrollably, and stomped one foot as hard as she could. But she had to do it. She pulled the cloth wrapped probe out again, re-soaked it in alcohol, and forced it back into the puncture. It didn't feel any better than it had the first time. In fact, it seemed like it felt worse. She kicked at the leg of the table. Then she did it a third time.

There were four punctures on her hand. Two on top, and two on the bottom. The combination of the probe, and the alcohol got them all to bleeding again. Which was good. The blood would help wash out any bacteria and dirt. She glared at her hand, as if that part of her body had somehow turned traitor, and gotten the bites and hurt so bad just to annoy her. But it was her own fault, not her hands. Her hand did whatever she told it to do.

After cleaning each puncture with the probe three times, she poured the alcohol from the bowl over it on each side, while she held her hand over the other bowl to collect the runoff. She did that a few times, then held up her hand to the sunlight. It seemed clean, and somehow _felt _cleaner despite the pain. Trickles of blood were still coming out of the punctures and she made a face at them.

"Looks like I was bitten by a giant bloody vampire bat." But vampire bats were tiny. There were no giant ones. Only stupid girls like her who made stupid mistakes with Stubs.

She wrapped a bandage around her hand, picked up the bucket of meat with her good hand, and went back out to continue her training with Stubs. As she went past her father, she saw that he and Wolfkiller were now putting some large iron weights in the chariot. What was that about she wondered for a moment, before recalling that the tigers were going to be for the Maestro. And he weighed what, about 1000 pounds? They obviously were trying to get the tigers gradually used to pulling that much weight.

On her way, she considered what to do when Stubs misbehaved. Swatting him hard on the nose and hurting him was a bad idea, but she couldn't let him get away with being naughty. She didn't have an electric whip like her father and Daniel Wolfkiller, and she suspected that what seemed like a 'tingle' to a big tiger might really hurt a little lynx like Stubs. Seigfried and Roy had used fire extinguishers, and she didn't have those, either, but their having sprayed something on their tigers gave her an idea. Maybe she could spray water on Stubs to punish him.

She turned back to the hospital and quickly got a big syringe, the sort her father used for inseminating some of the larger animals. Then she filled a small jar with water, screwed the lid on, and put the water and syringe on top of the meat in the bucket she carried. Pleased at her idea, she jogged quickly back to where Stubs was waiting for her. The lynx was sitting in one corner of the cage, his head down low, as if ashamed that he had bitten her.

"That's right. You SHOULD be ashamed." She scolded Stubs. "No more biting."

She went back into the cage, this time hanging the bucket of meat up on a hook welded to one bar, where Stubs couldn't reach it, picked her hoop back up from the ground, and let him sniff it. Then she took a piece of meat from the bucket, put the hoop about three feet high in the air, and held the meat in front of it with the tongs.

Which, of course, did not work at all. Stubs simply ran under the hoop and jumped up to snatch the meat from the tongs. No good. She thought about squirting Stubs with the water in the syringe, but he hadn't actually been bad and done something like bite her. He just didn't understand what she wanted him to do. It was too bad that animals couldn't talk, and you just couldn't tell them to do or not do what you wanted, the way you could people. But then again, you couldn't even tell all people that. The Maestro certainly didn't listen to what anyone else might want or not want him to do. He was like an animal that way. Except worse, since he _could _talk. He just didn't listen. Or maybe he did, and didn't care.

Aster tried again. This time she put the hoop right on the ground, in front of Stubs, and held the meat on the other side with the tongs. This time it worked. Stubs walked through the hoop, and took the meat. Pretty good. She did it a few more times, then moved the hoop up a few inches. Stubs hopped through the hoop, to get the meat, and she gradually moved the hoop higher. Now Stubs stopped doing it right, again, and crouched down low to go under the hoop.

"No, not that way, Stubs." She pushed his head back, and then he tried to go around the hoop. Aster gave up, and gave him the meat anyways. Even though that wasn't a good way of 'reinforcement' like in the books by B. F. Skinner. She tried again, the hoop lower down again, but Stubs didn't seem interested. His stomach bulged slightly. Obviously he was full, and wouldn't be very cooperative in learning to jump through the hoop until he was hungry again. Probably by tomorrow he would be.

Aster brought Stubs back to his cage. But the next day she tried again, and the day after that. She learned a lot of things in the process, such as putting some branches full of sharp thorns underneath and behind the hoop, so there was no way to get the meat except by going _through_ the hoop, and if Stubs tried to cheat, he would get scratched by the thorns, which only hurt a little bit. Seeing how her father only let the tigers have meat sometimes and not all the time, she eventually started only letting Stubs have the meat about half the time when he went through the hoop, and the other half the time she would pet him instead. Which he liked (Stubs was a sweetie, at least when he wasn't mad from being swatted on the nose), and it was one way it was better and more fun to train Stubs than to train tigers, like her father had to. You couldn't pet a tiger. They were too dangerous. You couldn't even turn your back on them for a second, the way she did to get a drink of water when she got thirsty working in the hot sun.

In less than a week, Aster had trained Stubs to jump through a hoop held at shoulder height, when she said the word 'Jump' in a commanding tone. Her hand still hurt when she cleaned it off a few times a day with the wood alcohol, and used a hot compress on it, to make sure it didn't get abcessed, but she didn't really mind anymore. She was proud of herself and Stubs.

She told her father the next morning that she was ready to show him what Stubs could do. She brought him over to the cage, held out the hoop, and said loudly: "Jump". True to his training, the lynx ran over and leaped high through the hoop. At least it seemed high to Aster. The cat could have easily gone higher, and no doubt would have been trained to do so by an adult more experienced in such matters. But her father seemed pleased.

"You did good with him." He praised her. "Keep him up on that trick. It's something you can show the people who visit the Zoo. The children especially will like it. I'll even get you a fancier hoop. Something with bright paint and ribbons."

Most people thought of Aster as a child, of course. Certainly Daniel Wolfkiller did. Though she hadn't though of herself that way in a couple years. To her, a 'child' was someone Thumb's age or younger. Probably they would be amazed by Stubs jumping through the hoop, and have no idea how in the world Aster could get him to do such a thing.

In the meantime, her father had finally gotten the tigers to pull a chariot with himself in it, along with a huge pile of iron weights, and to accept directions both by verbal command, and from pulling on the reins. They also were not staying in the cage any longer, her father was now letting the tigers pull the chariot right out through the cage door, and around the roads in the zoo. Sometimes it set the other animals in the Zoo to howling and shrieking, but after some effort, her father taught the tigers to ignore that, and not look at the other animals, but only look in the direction her father wanted them to go. He would drive the chariot around the zoo three times, with Wolfkiller jogging a short distance behind him (or a longer distance when he made the tigers run), and the zoo workers looking on nervously and trying to stay near the door of whatever building was nearest to run into and hide if they had to. Aster was no longer allowed to sit and watch any more from her stool, but had to look out the window of a building with a locked door, if she wanted to see her father go by in the tiger-pulled chariot. She laughed when she saw it the first time. It was almost as good as a parade in downtown Dystopia.

Eventually, he said it was time to show the Maestro what he had done, and turn the tigers over to him. The Maestro came that very afternoon, walking behind what looked to Aster like the fanciest chariot in the world. It was painted bright green, and set all over with green gems of some kind, with gold on all the edges, and filigreed flowers of lacy gold metalwork and green gems covering the entire outer surface. The inside of the chariot was covered with padded green leather, set with gold rivets, and a dark green floor with deep grooves to stand on. Aster was impressed. It was the fanciest thing she had ever seen that obviously was not made before the War.

When the Maestro came into the zoo, the chariot was being pulled by two drab looking horses, but the Maestro's servants quickly unhitched them, leaving the chariot standing by itself.

"Alright, Joshua." said the Maestro in a deep voice. "Let me see what these tigers of yours can do."

The zookeeper nodded nervously. "Help me bring the chariot into cage, Daniel. They're used to starting out from there, most of the time."

Her father and the Maestro's stable master pulled the chariot into the cage, where the tigers sat lazily, their tongues lolled out. They already had their bridle and harnesses on. As usual, her father did most of the dangerous work of attaching the harness to the chariot, then got into it, and drove it out the open cage door.

"Get in behind me." He urged the Maestro. "They're used to the weight. I'll show you how to command them."

The Maestro stepped into the fancy chariot, his weight causing it to sink low down on some metal springs that supported it. Her father took the reins and drove the tigers in a slow circle, explaining the verbal commands and how to use the reins to the Maestro.

"Using both is best." said her father. "The verbal commands and the reins reinforce each other. But you can use just the reins in situations where they might not hear you. A crowd, for instance. I've made some ear protectors for the tigers, and it's actually best for them to wear it if you take them somewhere crowded. Otherwise the noise might confuse or upset them."

"Get out." It was not a request. "Let me try what you taught me."

The zookeeper hastened to squeeze past one of the Maestro's enormous legs, and stepped out of the carriage. The Maestro took the reins, recalled the instructions he had been given, and pulling on the reins, said loudly 'MUSH'.

For a moment the tigers seemed confused by his voice, so much deeper than her fathers. But the rein commands were familiar, and they began walking obediently forward. The Maestro made them run a bit, then go in circles. When he stopped again, he was smiling broadly, showing huge, yellow teeth.

"I _LIKE_ it." He pronounced. "I have to congratulate you, Joshua, you've pulled off the impossible. Or at least the improbable."

"Thank you, my Lord. And thank you for your generosity in providing additional food for the Zoo animals. Do you mind if I instruct your stable master in the arrangements that will need to be taken for their care."

"Not at all. I'm interested myself." The Maestro looked at the reins. They seemed small in his huge hands. "I'll have to have grips of some kind put on these reins. But that's no great problem. Go on about what will be needed to care for them."

Aster's father talked about how one of the cages at the zoo would need to be disassembled and put back together. And how the tigers would need to have an area to roam with grass and trees, and a tall, inward slanting fence, and a moat dug as well.

"It sounds like a lot of work." The Maestro waved away most of what the zookeeper had had to say, with one hand. "I'll have the cage disassembled and brought to my palace, of course. The rest… I'll see if I have room for it all."

"_That means no_." Aster thought to herself. The Maestro didn't care if the tigers were happy, any more than he cared if people were happy. They were all nothing more to him than toys, and he was like a little three year old brat, who threw his toys around, and forgot about them in a corner when he wasn't playing with them, and broke them when he was in a bad mood. That animals weren't toys were one of the first things she learned at the zoo. You had to take care of them (or make sure someone else did) even if you were bored, or tired, or even sick. They had needs. People had needs, too, and probably more of them than animals did. But the Maestro didn't care about any people or animals or anything but himself. Aster exhaled angrily, only slightly audibly, through her nose.

Wrath.

It was a mistake. The Maestro heard. He turned his head towards Aster. He recognized her. "The ugly girl. Is there a problem?" His voice sounded like a tiger's growl.

No way was Aster going to tell the Maestro what the problem really was. Her mind raced for a plausible lie. One immediately came. She held up her bandaged hand. "My hand got bitten by a lynx last week. It really hurts."

"A lynx? How did that happen? When you were feeding it?"

Aster made her second mistake.

Pride.

She told the truth. She didn't see her father shaking his head ever so slightly. "I taught it to jump through a hoop. But I did it wrong at first, so it bit me."

"You taught it to jump through a hoop. In only a week." The Maestro mused. "How did you learn to do that?"

"Partly watching my father with the tigers. Partly reading the books he got about two men called Siegfried and Roy and some books written by someone called B.F. Skinner."

"You read the books over the summer?" asked the Maestro.

More pride.

And her third mistake. She told the truth again, and corrected the Maestro. "I read them over a weekend. But I had to go back and re-read them a few times, as well. Just to check on some stuff that was written."

"You read several college level psychology texts. 'Over the weekend'." The Maestro said nothing for a few moments, simply gazing at her unfathomably with oversized, squinting green eyes. "And you're how old?"

"Twelve." She remembered she was supposed to be polite. "My lord."

"Twelve." The Maestro tapped the edge of his carriage with his large fingers. Aster didn't know what to think or say. Finally the Maestro spoke again. "You're still ugly. And you still look like a boy."

"Yes, my Lord. I'm sorry if my appearance upsets you."

Aster's appearance was the least of the things the Maestro found upsetting about her, but he was hardly going to admit in public that he was upset by one small, ugly girl. He turned to his stable master. "You're work here is done, Wolfkiller. Gather up your belongings, and I'll expect you back at my palace by tonight. I'm putting you in charge of these beasts. You know more about them than anyone but the zookeeper, I expect."

With that, the Maestro took the reins of the chariot again, and urged the tigers on. It was evident he intended to drive them all the way to his palace. His stable master, Daniel Wolfkiller, waited until he was gone through the Zoo's main entrance, then jabbed a finger straight at Aster.

"I know you took the bottle from my shed, girl. Do you really think I cared about that?"

Aster looked baffled, and the stable master continued. "I know why you stole it. You think bottles are valuable. And you wanted to take something valuable from me. Because I offended you, Miss High and Mighty. God knows why. Well, let me tell you something. Bottles are _not_ valuable. They're all over the place in the Maestro's palace. There's things that are far more valuable. But maybe now you'll get your chance to find both out for yourself. As well as what it _really _means to be offended."

He stalked away, towards the house to gather up his things.

"Stupid girl." He called over his shoulder. "I told you to keep it under your hat!"


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6. Broken Toys

Children in Dystopia were expected to know a trade by the time they were 14. It didn't matter what the trade *was*. If they were lucky, and born to a family of privilege (said privilege likely to be revoked at any time, for any reason… or no reason), then their trade consisted of knowing how to maintain wealth and privilege. Relatively easy work, for most. Human beings, other than those bordering somewhere on the autistic side of the psychological spectrum like Aster, were naturally social creatures, and the desire and ability to climb the social ladder came easily to most. The ruthlessness needed to do so in Dystopia also came easily to most. If the choice was between hurting other relatively feeble human beings, and offending the Maestro, very few would even _consider_ the latter.

Those slightly less lucky might be chosen by the Maestro to learn to operate and repair what was left of the old technology. And there seemed to be little rhyme or reason as to _how _the Maestro chose those who were given the privilege of such education. He certainly didn't go to any effort to determine whether they had the intelligence for such work. Those able to learn it were required to compensate as best as they could for those who were unable to learn it. The wrath of the Maestro on hearing that someone was unable to do the job he wanted them to do as often as not extended unfairly to anyone who happened to be nearby at the time.

The less lucky were made to do a variety of manual jobs, ranging from the relatively easy (driving one of the old trucks to bring food and materials to Dystopia) to the backbreaking (pulling a hand plow)

If you were really unlucky, or displeased the Maestro, you got to pull a hand plow on a farm in the Outside (or the Wastelands as some called them). Given that most of those thus condemned did not know how to build an electroscope like Aster had, the radiation generally killed them in late middle age. Long enough to have children, generally doomed to the same backbreaking work and early death as themselves, to reflect on whatever errors they may have committed in life that consigned them and their offspring to such a fate, and to see the pick of everything they produced seized every year by the Maestro, regardless of what it was. The best meat animals, the biggest fruits and vegetables, and their very children, whether they be boys or girls were taken to feed or serve the tyrant of Dystopia.

Of course, the quality of 'the best' declined slightly every year. Those who lived in the wastelands blamed the radiation, perpetual conditions of heat and drought, and bad luck in general. The Maestro, in turn, blamed those who lived in the wastelands for causing the situation with their laziness and incompetence.

Either Joshua Aversa or his twelve year old daughter could have told them that they were both wrong. Eating your best animals and seed crops had a dysgenic effect. As did taking the best boys and girls out of the human breeding pool. There were a few others in Dystopia, such as Daniel Wolfkiller, who knew it, but they did not mention it to the Maestro. To the extent that the Maestro's head stable master thought about the matter at all, he assumed that given that the Maestro was a scientist, he already knew about the genetic effects of what he was doing, and either did not care, or was doing it deliberately. At any rate, Wolfkiller was not going to risk disturbing the Maestro's rather precarious mental equilibrium by bringing up the subject.

Wolfkiller was wrong, however. The Maestro did NOT know about the effects of his practices on the genetics of crops, livestock, or human beings. Although he was right to the extent that the Maestro would not have cared, if he had known. But the man the Maestro had one been had been a physicist who spent his entire life creating weapons of mass destruction for the purposes of murdering millions of innocent people. The entirety of his scientific endeavors was to destroy life of all sorts, not to preserve and maintain it. That being the case, biology and genetics were subjects he had had no use for, and knew very little about.

It was such a weapon, in fact, the Gamma bomb, that had transformed him from a human scientist into the superhuman monstrosity devoted to destruction that he was now. Though his survival and transformation were, perhaps, surprising in that he had beaten the odds of simply being incinerated by his own gamma bomb, _what_ he had become should not have surprised anyone. When he had been caught in the blast of his own gamma bomb, consummating, as it were, the relationship between the creation and the creator, he simply became a mirror of the creation.

A weapon of mass destruction.

That anyone had ever thought otherwise, or thought that he could somehow be redeemed from what he had become was the folly of fools, blinded by friendship and the absurd thought that patriotism somehow excused endeavors of mass murder. They had eventually all paid for their folly with their lives.

Aster was troubled by very little, of this. The Maestro was unpleasant, but he was simply something that was _there, _not much different from things like mudholes or mutated trees in the Outside that dripped smelly sap. She was vaguely aware from hearsay that the Maestro had once been a man, and transformed into what he was by a freak accident with a bomb. From the same hearsay, she knew that there had been a very few other such people. None of whom really mattered, because they either couldn't or wouldn't offer any aid to the people in Dystopia in general (or the Zoo, specifically). A doctor Samson something or the other who had been killed by the Maestro. A woman who was supposedly locked in an iron box somewhere in the Maestro's palace. There were rumors of an ugly green fishy creature everyone called 'Abominable' that lived in swamps somewhere in the Outside, and sulked in the mud most of the time. Though occasionally, so Aster had heard, he would come out and rob people, or raid farms for food. She had once met a farmer in the market in Dystopia who swore that the 'Abominable Creature' had once come to his farm, picked up a whole entire cart full of sacks of wheat, weighing no less than a full ton, mind you, and simply jumped off with it to somewhere or the other. Not that his story had impressed the Maestro. The Maestro told him that his full tribute of wheat was due that year, Abominable Creature or no Abominable Creature. The farmer had been forced to sell his youngest son as a slave, to get the money to buy more wheat.

At age 14, Aster was not precisely an exception to the rule of children being expected to know how a trade at that age. She knew most of what she needed to know to run the Bronx Zoo. Her father never missed an opportunity to give her knowledge and experience. Recently, for instance, some of the buffalo had been giving birth prematurely. Her father had stayed up nights studying notes he had taken of their ancestry and which males and females he had mated together, with the result that he sold a particular male that he said had genetic problems at the market in Dystopia. However, he also showed Aster what to do in the case of premature birth. Sometimes the tiny baby buffalo could be saved. If they were not _too _tiny. If they were born too young, her father said, their lungs were not developed. Even if they could breath on their own, there were other problems, such as not being able to keep themselves warm, being too weak to nurse, their mothers rejecting them (nature knows best her father said about that). Often, keeping them alive meant wrapping them in a wool blanket near the fire and letting Thumb nurse them with a bottle full of warmed up goat's milk. A few of the premature buffalo they were able to save, although her father sold them later that year. He didn't want to breed bad stock.

Still, there was so much to learn. Even her father confessed that he didn't know everything there was to know about the zoo, or all the animals. Probably no single person ever could, he had once told Aster. Before the war, the Zoo had been run by a lot of different people, each of them with a different area of knowledge. He knew enough to run the zoo, as did Aster by this time. But more importantly, he knew how to find out information that he didn't have, if he ever needed it. For instance, what to do when an animal got botflies, as several did in the summer after some of the buffalo had given birth prematurely.

Her father took Aster to the Library with him to watch how he picked out the right books and used their index to firstly find out just _what _was wrong with the animals and secondly, what to do about it. It required minor surgery. There were non-surgical treatments for botflies, but unfortunately those pretty much only worked for human beings, as they required a high degree of cooperation from the patient to work.

There were other things to learn as well. Although the notion of tiger testicles, or any other animal parts having any sort of medical benefit was absurd, there were things that did work. Mainly different sorts of plants, such as the opium poppies that provided their only anesthetic. A lot of them were extinct, but a surprising number of them had been kept alive and grown in gardens and greenhouses in Dystopia. Aster often went to the library and got books about medicinal herbs, and occasionally bought some of them that were for sale in the market in Dystopia. Willow bark was especially good for treating headaches. It tasted _awful_, though.

During the two years since the zookeeper, Joshua Aversa and the Maestro's stable master, Daniel Wolfkiller had trained the tigers to pull a chariot for the Maestro, Aster had often seen the Maestro going through the streets of Dystopia in his chariot, the two tigers often growling slightly as they pulled his weight. It looked to Aster as if they were badly underweight, and whenever she saw them, she generally went into the nearest open building, bearing in mind her father's warning that even a tame tiger was generally only three good meals away from becoming a maneater. The other people on the street would generally bow, and get out of the way to one side, but didn't seem concerned about the presence of the tigers. They seemed to think that since they would never contemplate disobeying anyone as strong as the Maestro, the tigers wouldn't either.

_Fools. _Was Aster's thought, when people who had little _children_ with them would merely get a few feet out of the way when the Maestro went past in his chariot. All predators attacked the weak. Which meant the young, the old, and the sick. Thinking that the tigers would know in the same way they did that attacking the Maestro was another word for suicide was a mistake. It was a mistake her father had taught her about, though she forgot exactly when. _Anthropomorphism._ It meant thinking (erroneously) that animals saw or thought about the world anything like in the same way human beings did. No, the tigers would not have the sense, as people did, to NOT attack the Maestro, or someone else, if they became sufficiently enraged or hungry. It was the possibility of attacking _someone else_ that worried Aster the most. The Maestro was strong enough to protect himself from the tigers. Other people were not, and Aster had serious doubts as to whether or not even the Maestro would be fast enough to prevent a tiger from ripping someone's throat out. Or if he would even try. From what Aster knew of his character, it was entirely likely that the Maestro would find the spectacle of some helpless person being ripped apart by tigers to be _funny_.

Over the course of the two years since the tigers had been trained, Aster noticed that the Maestro gradually rode in the chariot pulled by them less and less. Which pretty much fit in with her assessment of how he thought of the tigers. As toys, not living creatures, and like most toys, especially those owned by immature children, the Maestro eventually started to get bored with it. Once, when the Maestro's chariot went by only a few inches away from the window of a building where Aster had taken shelter when she saw the Maestro and his tigers approaching, she saw that not only were the tigers underfed, and infested with botflies, but the bright green paint on the chariot was faded and peeling, the iron rims of the wheels rusting, and some of the gold metalwork broken off.

The chariot was…worn out. Dying. Like the tigers. Like everything in Dystopia. Aster recalled the broken green window panes she had seen in the Maestro's palace, which nobody had cared to fix. The entire city and everything in it (especially the Maestro) was like a maggot. Feeding on the remains of the dead. But even maggots were part of life, and helped create soil. Dystopia created nothing. It only took. From the past. From the people. More like a fire, than a worm. It turned everything to ashes.

_What happens when it all wears out?_ Aster wondered as the chariot clattered on down the street. _What happens to the zoo? What happens to ME? I don't think the Maestro is going to do without whatever he wants, for the sake of anyone else. He'll kill this place. And everyone in it. Then go on to somewhere else. If there is anywhere else. Iceland, maybe. I've heard there's people there and hardly any radiation._

It was a cold thought. Another one, even colder, followed it.

_What happens when he's killed the whole world?_

After nearly two years of owning his tigers, the Maestro hardly ever took them out at all. He seemed to have a new toy, some giant dogs (Aster had no idea that dogs could GET that big) that had robotic parts somehow made a part of them. Some sort of surgery, she guessed, apparently done at the Maestro's palace, because neither she nor her father could have begun to approach anything of that complexity at the zoo. He would often walk, the dogs in front of him. Aster listened to people talk about the dogs. They'd been not only bred to be big, but injected with steroids and growth hormones since birth. Their very brains had been partly removed, and the missing parts replaced with pre-War computers. Unlike the tigers, the dogs would never think of attacking the Maestro. Or anyone else, unless the Maestro commanded. They _couldn't _think of such disobedience, any more than a clock could think of not going 'tick tock tick tock' all day long.

Looking at the giant dogs made Aster cold. Their eyes had no more life than the headlights of the trucks that brought food and other goods from the Outside to Dystopia. They were not animals. Not even alive, really. They just had living meat stuck onto a machine. Toys, literally. Maybe it was kinder. They probably couldn't suffer, the way the tigers could.

Still, the Maestro took his tigers out once a month or so. Aster thought of sending a letter to the Maestro, to ask him to either care for the tigers better, or give them back to the zoo. She decided against it. Attracting any attention from the Maestro, if you didn't absolutely have to, was a dangerous idea. Then she thought of sending a letter to his stable master, Daniel Wolfkiller, asking him to care for the tigers better. She decided against it. She didn't like the man or want his attention any more than the Maestro's, and either he didn't care that the tigers were slowly starving, or was unable to do anything about it. The latter was probably more likely, she was forced to admit grudgingly to herself. Much as she disliked the rather dirty and nasty man, it seemed that he would not have gotten into the business of caring for horses if he didn't at least care a little for animals.

She also rejected the notion of asking the Maestro to return the tigers to the zoo, if he was no longer interested in them. That would have also attracted the Maestro's attention to her, and given that he behaved pretty much like a spoiled, angry three year old, he would probably not take kindly to the suggestion that he give up any of his toys. Even toys that he didn't care about or want any more. No, he'd see the tigers dead, before giving them up. Besides which, the Zoo always seemed to be short of food, especially meat. It would be foolish to waste meat on tigers that couldn't breed because they were castrated, when they were having a hard enough time feeding those that could breed, to try and maintain the species. Though for what, Aster was rapidly becoming nearly as cynical as her father about. There was no place for the animals, other than in the Zoo. Almost all of the world was dead, and seemed to be getting worse. Except maybe Iceland, and faraway places like that, but she was under no delusions. She had no more chance of getting the zoo animals to Iceland than she had of getting them to the moon.

It was only a few days after Aster had considered (and rejected) sending a letter to the Maestro or Daniel Wolfkiller that she was very surprised by Wolfkiller actually showing up at the Zoo. He had been obviously not happy to ever to have been there in the first place, and more than happy to leave, and Aster would have thought that if he had his way, he wouldn't want to ever set foot in the zoo again.

Aster did not like the man any better than she did two years ago, and if anything, upon seeing him, her previous estimation of his personal hygiene habits had gone downwards. But although not socially inclined, she was capable of learning, and had learned to be more polite in the past two years. Besides, for all she knew, the Maestro had forbidden the man to wash. She had heard of the tyrant of Dystopia inflicting such bizarre punishments on people for minor offenses (real or imagined) before.

"Mister Wolfkiller." She greeted him politely when he came into the zoo. "Or Stablemaster, if you will. What can I do for you?"

She saw that he had new clothes, and a rifle slung over his back. Apparently either his efforts with the tigers, or with the Maestro's horses, or both, had paid off with money, or a promotion. Or both. Though his new clothes did not seem much cleaner than his old ones, which always had seemed grubby even right after Aster had washed them in the big tub, with the best lye soap.

Wolfkiller peered at her from under his greasy bangs with black eyes that seemed not a bit more pleasant than they had been two years ago. Well, so much for gratitude for her attempted politeness. "The Maestro's killed one of the tigers. I need to speak to your father."

"One of the tigers!" Bloody hell. Now Aster felt like a coward for not writing that letter to the Maestro. Maybe he _would_ have started taking better care of them if she had explained well enough how bad they felt, how much it must have hurt them when they were starving. "What happened?"

"It attacked him. This morning at the market. He killed it, of course."

Aster sighed. She had been expecting something of the sort for over a year, now. There was no controlling tigers, not when they were hungry. She was actually surprised it had taken one of them this long to attack it's 'owner'. Though you never really owned an animal, unless maybe it was just a machine toy like the Maestro's giant robot dogs. You could befriend them, tame them, even imprison them. But never really owned them the way you did a clock or a bottle. Always was the possibility of their having their own thoughts that were contrary to yours.

"And the other?"

"In it's cage. I don't think the Maestro means to let it out again." Wolfkiller seemed about to say something else. His cold black eyes actually had a touch of pity. For the tiger, Aster guessed. "I need to talk to your father about it."

"He's with the wolves. I'll go fetch him for you."

"I know where it is. You stay here. I want to talk to him alone." He glanced at her once more, still looking a little sad. He shook his head. "You're still small."

Then Wolfkiller turned and left. So much the better. Aster still didn't like the man. Though at least he seemed to feel a little bad about what had happened to the tigers. Although she had no idea what her being small, now or in the past had to do with anything. She was growing taller. Assuming that really mattered one way or the other, which she couldn't see that it did.

She went about taking care of the animals near her. One of the deer needed a hoof filed, and wouldn't stand still for it, running away ever time it felt the rasp of the file, so Aster finally had to tie it to a tree. Then she was able to file the hoof, despite the deer trying to kick and run away. But without free motion it couldn't get any leverage and she managed the job.

Her father came back with Wolfkiller, going towards the house. Aster could tell he was very upset about what happened. His face was distraught and he waved his arms as he always did when very angry about something. She caught a little of the conversation between him and Wolfkiller as they went past.

"But why?!" Her father seemed not to understand some point or the other about what Wolfkiller had told him. Which was odd. One tiger was dead, the other locked up forever, or until it died of starvation, which probably wouldn't be all that long. What else was there to understand?

"He feels you cheated him. That you didn't train the tigers properly, or maybe even somehow trained them to attack him. So he wants compensation."

"For the love of God. Can't he see sense? No animal can be trained not to go for food if you're going to starve it like that, no matter _what _you do. Hell, you can't even train most people not to do that. No, never mind. He is what he is. I'm glad you told me. Still, why… that? It's hardly…"

He noticed Aster by the deer, and seemed angry. "Get in the house! Right now!"

Aster hastily untied the deer, and scurried into the house. She had no idea what was going on. Apparently the Maestro was blaming her father for the tiger attacking him, something that anyone sane could see was caused by the Maestro's own stupidity in not feeding the tigers decently, and now wanted her father to pay some huge compensation in money or zoo animals that he didn't want to pay.

Probably they'd have to pay him. Regardless of how much it was. They'd get by, somehow. They always did.

She peered out the window of the house. Her father kept on talking to the Maestro's stable master for several more minutes. Then the stable master left, shaking his head again about something, and her father headed towards another part of the zoo. Probably to take care of the animals. So maybe things were back to normal.

But they were not normal. Her father didn't come back for supper. Aster heated up some stew from the previous day for herself and Thumb, making a face at the taste. The meat was a little bit tainted. She didn't know if her father would want any when he came back to the house, but she'd have to throw the rest away. You couldn't eat meat when it got too bad, you'd get sick. Aster over-salted the stew, and that hid the taste a little.

"Where's father?" Thumb asked, taking an apple out of a basket to get the taste of the tainted stew out of her mouth.

"I don't know." It was not like their father not to be there for supper, and not to have told Aster and Thumb where he was going and that he would be late.

It got dark, and eventually Aster told Thumb to go to bed. She wanted to stay up and wait for their father, so threw a few more logs of wood into the iron stove and lit a candle inside a lantern, but eventually fell asleep, despite her best efforts.

She was awoken sometime late at night, or maybe it was early morning, before dawn, by her father shaking her shoulder. It was dark, the fire in the stove had died down to bare embers and the candle had gone out. She started for a moment, before recognizing him in the light of the oil lantern he carried.

"Aster…" his voice trembled. "Come here. Sit down at the table."

Aster got up from the chair by the iron stove and sat down at the table. Her father had his leather satchel that he used for carrying medical tools. He opened it up and took out a large syringe, the sort used for the bigger animals like tigers. It was full of a murky brown liquid. He set it down at the table, a horrible look on his face as he regarded it. Then he looked up at Aster.

"Aster…" he shook his head. "What do you think of the Maestro? Tell me the truth."

When Aster had been only eight, she had thought of the Maestro as a fierce, but mainly inscrutable king, not to be questioned, like the kings in the fairytale books she had liked to read at that age. The real truth had become glaring obvious to her in the 6 years and some odd months since then.

"He's a monster. I hate him. He takes the best animals from the zoo, and from all the farmers. Daniel Wolfkiller said he killed one of the tigers and locked up the other one in a tiny cage. He cuts out the brains from puppies and puts machines in their heads. He kills people who disappoint him even when they have tried their best."

"Yes." Her father said nothing for a minute. "And I disappointed him."

"Because the tiger attacked him? That's not your fault. Anyone can see that. Even the Maestro has to see that."

"I'm sure he does see it." He laughed ruefully. "But he doesn't care. Like I've told you many times before, he's like a little boy, in some ways. He never puts any responsibility on himself. The tiger attacking him has to be someone's fault, and of course it can't be his. So why not blame me? I'm convenient. So I'm the one who has to be punished. And give him a new toy to play with, to replace the one that I supposedly broke."

"What does he want? More tigers?" Aster frowned. The zoo didn't have that many to spare.

"No." His fingers barely caressed the syringe, and then he hastily withdrew them, as if they had been burned. "He wants… you… Aster."

"Me?" She would have been less surprised if told that the Maestro wanted a flock of extinct birds like flamingoes. "What does he want with me? He doesn't have any zoo animals other than that tiger in the cage, and Daniel Wolfkiller takes care of his horses and dogs for him. Even if he did have zoo animals, you'd know more about them than I do."

"No… your education has nothing to do with what he wants with you. Or maybe it does. You're probably smarter than he is. Maybe not as well educated in all the old pre-War technology. But smarter. And he hates that."

"Is…" now Aster's voice trembled. She had tried her entire life not to offend the Maestro. Now apparently she had, anyways, through no fault of her own. "Is he going to kill me?"

"No… he wants to ruin you. Very likely he may kill you, either in the process, or afterwards. But first he wants to ruin you. Likely he'll keep you alive for long enough to see that happen. He wants…" Her father had a hard time getting the words out directly. "He wants you for the same thing men want the women who work in brothels for."

"He wants to have sex with me?" Vomit rose in her throat. "But he said I was ugly. And I haven't even started bleeding yet."

"Oh, you poor child." Her father got up and hugged her around the head. "This isn't sex. This isn't anything like it, except in the strict mechanical sense. And he doesn't care about your looks. Or late development. You're nothing to him but a toy that's offended him, and he wants to break you before throwing you out with yesterday's trash."

He released his embrace and taking a deep breath, slid the syringe towards her. "I brought you this. Opium. Enough to kill you. It'll be like going to sleep."

Aster shoved her chair backwards violently, jumped up and retreated.

"I don't want to die!" she screamed.

"You're probably going to die anyways. And suffer for it first. I know you deserve better than this but… sometimes a painless death is better."

"You said probably… so there's a chance I might not die."

"A small chance. Very small. Even if you don't die, you're probably going to be crippled. It isn't worth whatever small chance you might have, to go through all that."

"But I was to be zookeeper!" Aster protested. "If I die, what happens to the animals? To Thumb?"

"The Maestro won't ever let you be zookeeper." Her father shook his head. "Not anymore. I'll be lucky if he lets me train someone else. And I'm not sure I even want to. I might just let the animals go. Take their chances Outside."

"No. They wouldn't have a chance." Not between the lack of food and the radiation. Aster sniffed back some tears. "Keep them. Find someone else to take care of them. There's still time. Maybe Daniel Wolfkiller knows someone who would be interested."

"I'm useless." Her father slumped. "I can't save you. I can't even help you. If I had Wolfkiller's guts, I'd kill you."

"Stop that! Wolfkiller is a jerk. You don't want to be like him. And you got more guts than him. You were less afraid of the tigers when you were training them. Its not your fault. Save what you can. Take care of Thumb and the animals."

"For what? There's nowhere else for them to live. All that's here in the Zoo are living fossils of species that should be dead."

"There's Iceland." Aster pointed out and her father laughed slightly. He knew as well as Aster that Iceland might as well be the moon, for all the chance they had of ever getting the animals there. "If Iceland survived the War, maybe someplace else did. Maybe we just don't know about it. Or the weather and radiation might get better. The old books say that radiation fades with time. We don't know when it'll be gone. How would you feel if you killed all the zoo animals, and year after that, the radiation was gone."

Joshua nodded. That was a point. But what a cost. The one thing the Maestro was best at was knowing how to hurt people. "If only it were me the Maestro wanted. I would have gone, and gladly left you in charge of the Zoo."

"But it isn't. And I have to die sometime, I guess. I don't want it to be now, but it is. It's like you said. The worm will have it's due. Don't..don't let it be for nothing. Keep the animals. I thought I would live for a lot longer than this... but if all my life and death do is to keep them alive, at least it will have meant something. If you wreck the zoo, or if the Maestro wrecks it, because he didn't get what he wanted, I'll still be dead, and it will all have been for nothing." She picked up the syringe. "I'll need a jar for this. Something I can put in my pocket."

"A jar…" Her father was nonplussed. "What for."

Aster held up the syringe, trembling and gazing at death in a vial. "I might change my mind."


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter 7. Expensive Education.

_Not fair. _Aster thought as she put together a few things. Not that she'd need much, if she were going to die. _Not fair. I was supposed to be Zookeeper, not hauled off to be raped by some monster. I hate the Maestro. What did I ever do to him? Read some books too fast? Be smarter than him at the same age? What was I supposed to be able to do about that?_

Thumb woke up, squinting at the first beginnings of the early morning sun coming through the window. "Aster, what are you doing up so early?"

"Go to sleep, Thumb." Aster said.

Of course like any 9 year old, Thumb didn't listen much to older siblings. She sat up and saw Aster packing some things in a canvas bag. "Are you going somewhere?"

"I…" How did you tell your sister that you were going off to be raped by a monster, something that would probably kill you, and the monster would probably kill you afterwards even if it didn't. And that if you _didn't_ go, if you hid or ran away or killed yourself, the monster would probably kill her and your father and all the animals in the Zoo instead. After which (if you chose to hide or run away) the monster would find and kill you anyways.

No, that was not something she could tell Thumb. She had no idea what her father would tell Thumb. There weren't any really clever lies, at least that Aster could think of, to explain away the fact that she was probably never coming back. That she'd probably be dead in a few days at the most. Still, she could lie about why she was going away. If there was a better lie, let her father think of it.

"The Maestro's horses are sick." She told Thumb. "Father can't leave the zoo right now, so he wants me to look at them and see if I can help them."

"Oh." The lie fooled Thumb. "What do you think is wrong with them."

"Well, I won't really know until I look at them, will I." said Aster. "Probably it's just botflies or worms or something."

"Is that why Mister Wolfkiller was here yesterday?" asked Thumb. "About the horses?"

"Yes, it was about the horses." _It was about ME. _"Wolfkiller isn't sure what's wrong with them. I need to find out. If I don't know, I'll look it up in the Library. Wolfkiller doesn't read very well, so I can find out from books a lot faster than him."

"I like horses." Thumb said. She looked over at a small figure of a horse made from pre-War plastic that she kept with her toys. "I don't like Mister Wolfkiller, though. He's scary and mean."

"I don't like him, either." _Even though he came to warn us what the Maestro wanted. _"But he has a job to do, and so do I. You don't always need to like someone in order to do a job with them. The job is the important thing, not how you feel. You understand?"

"Not really." Thumb pulled her blankets around her. The sun was higher now. "Maybe if I had a job, if I was going to be Zookeeper like you, I'd understand it."

"Never mind." The Maestro would probably be there for her before noon. She regarded what she had packed. A change of clothes that she probably wouldn't live to wear, or be allowed to wear even if she _did_ live beyond the next 24 hours. A few of her favorite books. A stuffed animal, a gaudy orange and black tiger cub with green plastic eyes that had been sold in the gift shop of the Bronx Zoo, before the war. The synthetic cloth had faded only a little with time. She looked at one seam on the toy tiger. She had spent a few hours carefully picking out a few inches of the old seam, removing part of the stuffing, and hiding a jar with the opium solution and syringe inside. She didn't think the Maestro would allow her to take along the means of escaping him so easily. Not if he knew she had it. But he might let her take along a toy. She pressed the stuffed toy along different sides. Good. The seam where she had stitched it back up by hand was barely visible, and she couldn't feel the jar or the syringe deep inside the stuffing, either.

"You stay inside." She warned Thumb. "The Maestro is in a really bad mood, because of his horses being sick. He doesn't want to be bothered by little kids like you. Okay?"

Thumb nodded her assent, and Aster looked around at her room, scanning the possessions accumulated during fourteen short years. There was really nothing else to bring. What good were all her books, now? She had read most of them so many times that she had them all practically memorized, anyways. Jewelry? It was all cheap glass and old chains and seashells on leather cords she used as necklaces, nothing like the gems she had seen the women at the Maestro's palace wearing. Possibly she'd get gems like that to wear. Not that she wanted them. Not that she'd likely even live to wear them.

She went to the closet and dressed up in what she thought of as her 'Zoo Uniform'. Of course, the Bronx Zoo had never made uniforms in her size, and all the old uniforms from before the war had long since been worn to rags, but she had made her own 'Zoo Uniform' from tan pants and shirt, with a real embroidered badge, in red, gold and yellow, that had a brown gazelle, an extinct animal something like a deer, in the center, and that read "OFFICIAL ZOOKEEPER – BRONX ZOO" in neatly embroidered letters around the edge. That the patch was not actually one worn by actual Zookeepers before the war, but rather, a souvenir sold in the same Zoo gift shop that her stuffed tiger had come from, was something Aster was unaware of. So far as she was concerned, it was preWar, and that made it official.

She finished packing her canvas bag. Should she write a will? Probably not. All her things would go either to her father or to Thumb. She picked up the bag with one hand, tucked the stuffed toy tiger under the other one, and went outside. Her father was there.

"Do you want me to stay with you?"

Aster nodded silently. Tears trickled from her eyes. It was now late enough in the morning that the Maestro had had time for breakfast, to wash and get dressed, and leave his palace. He was probably on his way to the Zoo to get her by now.

_Not fair. This is not how things were supposed to be. _Of course, she didn't really have any clear idea of _how_ things were supposed to be, other than becoming zookeeper when her father got too old to keep up with the work. Being a late developer, physically, Aster had never really thought much about who she might marry. If anyone. Certainly not to a horrible, hateful monster ten times her size, though.

Then again, they weren't getting married. The Maestro's only use for her was sex, the same as men used the women in the brothels for, and he certainly wasn't going to marry her, any more than men married the women in the brothels.

Soon enough, Aster heard the Maestro approaching, with his usual retinue of servants. He had two of his robotic War dogs on a leash in front of him. Aster still hated the sight of the things. Behind him were several servants. No women. All men or eunuchs, though she couldn't always tell the difference. Except she saw Daniel Wolfkiller with them, wearing the same clothes he had had on the previous day, rifle still slung over his back. She knew that Wolfkiller wasn't a eunuch. Eunuchs didn't have any use for prostitutes. There was also a flat wagon, pulled by two white horses, with a small cage on top of it, maybe four feet along each side and eight feet tall.

_Meant for me. _Aster thought. Apparently she was to be paraded through Dystopia like some sort of captured exotic animal.

The Maestro frowned as he saw her outside with packed bags, and frowned worse when he Zoo Uniform. He squinted at her, then glared at her father. He spoke to her father in a rumbling voice. "So someone told you I was coming for her. No matter. But that being the case, you might have dressed her in something more appropriate."

Joshua Aversa shrugged helplessly. It was pointless to tell the Maestro that all of Aster's clothes were suitable for doing work around the Zoo. "What would you regard as appropriate?"

The Maestro shrugged. "Take off your clothes, Aster."

Aster's jaw set slightly at being made to take off her Zoo uniform for this ugly, hateful monster. Then an old memory, unbidden, drifted into her mind. Something she hadn't thought of for a few years, but it gave her comfort now.

_Never mind. It doesn't really matter._ She clenched her jaw tighter, reached up, and unbuttoned her shirt. She wasn't wearing a bra. She didn't even begin to need one. She saw her father open his mouth, then shut it again and turn away. She was alone. She took off her shoes and socks, then unbuttoned her pants and pulled them off, along with her underwear. The Maestro leered at her.

_Nevermind it._ She thought. _Animals don't wear clothes, and they don't care. Never mind the way he's looking at me, either. Just pretend he's a big stupid, like the boys who tease the animals in the Zoo. I'll just pretend I'm a tiger, like my toy._

She jutted her jaw forward and pulled her lips back over her teeth slightly, pretending they were sharp fangs and that she was making the same fierce expression an angry tiger would. The Maestro shrugged, not sure why this girl appeared to be grinning, and not familiar enough with animals to know that in every species but man, baring the teeth was a sign of aggression. Perhaps the girl was actually looking _forward_ to this. A lot of women were attracted to power. Or perhaps she was mad. No matter, for the purpose he had in mind for her, sanity (or the lack thereof) were both pretty much irrelevant.

"Open your mouth." He ordered Aster.

Aster obeyed, and let the Maestro look at her teeth, thinking that if she were really a tiger, and had sharp teeth, she'd bite his finger right off and see how he liked _that._

"Good teeth. No cavities. You've brushed them regularly." The Maestro glanced over at where her father was looking at the ground. "You've taken good care of her. But I expected no less, you've always taken good care of the animals in the zoo, so you would hardly do any less for your own daughter."

Her father looked up, and fell to his knees. "Please… my Lord. Let her go. Look at her, she's still a child. Take me instead. I'll care for your horses or Wardogs. Or kill me if you want. Anything. Just let her go. I've spent years training her to be Zookeeper. Who's to take care of the animals once I'm gone if you take her away?"

The Maestro frowned with disapproval. "Girls are not meant to be zookeepers. Or to be educated at all. They have only two purposes. Pleasing men and breeding. You're not that old, Joshua. Find another wife and have a son, and train him. Or find an apprentice somewhere on the streets. But as for training your daughter to be Zookeeper, honestly, you really should have known that you were wasting your time. I don't know where your head was when you thought of that idea. You need several men here to help you run the place. What sort of man would let a _woman _order him around?"

The men who helped with the tremendous amount of work needed to run the zoo had been listening to Aster for at least a few years now, but it wouldn't do for her father to mention that. He noticed that most of the men who worked for him were not around. Two were, one was looking down at the ground, apparently fascinated with the mineral composition of some pebbles near his feet. The other was smirking at the sight of his nude daughter.

_I'll fire that man._ Joshua thought coldly. _But first I'll beat him bloody with a club. Hell, maybe I'll break both his legs and throw him into the tiger enclosure._

He knew as he thought it, that he wouldn't throw the man to the tigers. The other men who worked for him would hardly put up with one of their own being murdered. And for the sake of his other daughter, he couldn't do something that rash, that would get him hung. But he _would _damn well beat him bloody before tossing him out the front gate of the zoo. Probably he'd have to pay a fine. Screw the fine, he'd pay it.

Daniel Wolfkiller was looking right at Aster, too, Joshua saw. But he wasn't smirking. His expression was… odd. More the way a man would look at a freak, than a nude woman. Or girl. It was as if his daughter had suddenly grown an extra head, or turned as green as the Maestro.

Having finished looking at Aster's teeth and giving his opinion as to the stupidity of her ever having been educated, the Maestro looked at the rest of her body.

"You _still_ look like a boy." The green tyrant declared. "But you have good muscles. There's potential there. I can always see potential in a woman."

Aster's father and the Wolfkiller, unbeknownst to eachother, had nearly identical thoughts at that remark. That the Maestro had completely ignored Aster's greatest potential, her mind, in favor of something utterly trivial dictated by his lusts. It was as if someone were to find a diamond the size of their fist, completely ignore the value they could get for it as jewelry, and decide that the greatest use for it would be as a paperweight.

Having finished assessing Aster's body, the Maestro turned his attentions to the belongings she had brought. He pointed to the canvas bag. The laces that held it shut were too small for his overly large fingers.

"Open that." He ordered Aster. "Take out whatever's in there."

Aster complied, lining up her few changes of clothing and the favorite books she had decided to bring.

"You won't need any of that, where you're going." The Maestro admonished her. "Those are hardly suitable clothes for a woman. And it's a waste of time for a girl to read books. Leave them here."

He turned his green eyes to the toy tiger. "What's this?"

Aster hugged the toy to herself. "It's Tony Tiger. I've had him since I was little. I keep him on my bed near my pillow."

"Take it." The Maestro waved his hand dismissively. "It'll make a good decoration in the women's quarters. Now get on up there into the cage."

Without looking at her father, Aster tossed her stuffed toy onto the wagon, then went over to one of the wheels, intending to use the spokes as a step, but before she could, the Maestro seized her around the waist, and lifted her bodily up onto the wagon. He took the opportunity to feel with one finger between her legs as she did so.

"Nice." He purred appreciatively. A green tongue snaked out and licked his lips. "Smooth and tight."

Aster shuddered inside, but said nothing. She just made her tiger face, wishing again that she had fangs to bite off the finger that was violating her, and waited for the Maestro to release her. As soon as he did, she picked up her stuffed tiger, went into the cage, and sat down crosslegged.

Daniel Wolfkiller regarded the Maestro's latest acquisition in silence, his face carefully blank.

_The Maestro took the wrong things away from her._ He thought. _She did not bring that toy out of any childhood affection. Something's inside it probably. The Maestro is judging her by appearances, and she LOOKS like a child. And he wouldn't suspect a child of smuggling. But she's older than she looks in years, and is probably the smartest person in this entire crowd right now. Including her own father, who is no dummy. Worse yet for him, is the fact that the people who are going to see him bringing her back to his palace aren't going to know that she's fourteen, and they aren't going to know what's in her head, either. All they're going to see is a girl who looks closer to nine or ten than fourteen, who has tits the size of radishes and doesn't have a hair anywhere on her except her head. A girl still young enough to be hugging a stuffed toy for comfort. And being brought back to be raped by HIM. The Maestro might want 'respect' but after today I think he'll get precious little of it. The Maestro might not realize it yet, but that girl and her little stuffed toy are going to deal him a blow far worse than any he got from the Shulk or the Abomination when they tried to kill him._

Once Aster had sat down, the Maestro snapped shut the overly large padlock on the cage. She dimly heard him telling Daniel Wolfkiller to get the horses going. She hugged her tiger to her, glad of the comfort. She couldn't bear to look at her father any more, and instead looked at the zoo, as she went past all the cages.

_I guess I had some good things in my life. _Aster thought, her eyes tearing up. _I learned about animals, and got to pet a lot of them. The goats liked me, and Mr Stubs liked me, except when he bit me that one time, but otherwise he was good and learned to jump through a hoop pretty fast. And I got to show people around the zoo and tell them about the animals, and they thought I was pretty smart._

She thought again of the old memory that had comforted her, when the Maestro had forced her to strip out of her Zoo uniform. It was a bit of a mystery, it had always been in the back of her mind, and she had honestly meant to try to find out about it when she was older. But now she guessed she would never find out. Maybe someone else would. Someday.

The wagon left the Zoo, and clattered through the streets of Dystopia, which were crowded with people who scrambled to one side or the other as soon as they saw that it was the Maestro who was coming. The streets were dirtier than Aster remembered. Or maybe it was the whole situation that was dirty, and affecting her perception. But there were stinking puddles, scraps of spoiled food, and lumps of ordure everywhere. Despite her situation, she couldn't help taking the surroundings in with cold analysis.

_Going to wind up with disease from all that filth. _She thought. She wrinkled her face at the people looking at the wagon, sure they were laughing at her. It would serve them right if they got sick. For laughing at her, and for letting the streets get so dirty. Her father would never tolerate such filth in the zoo, that was for sure.

In point of fact, at least a few people _were _laughing at Aster. The harsh conditions in the post-War world meant that a lot of people were not particularly nice, and there was also rather little entertainment. The sight of a nude woman in a cage, even if she did look like just a girl, was an exciting diversion from the usual boring, unpleasant routine of their lives. Not to mention that a few of them had been annoyed in the past when Aster had flashed her ID card identifying her as the daughter of the Zookeeper to force them to forego having just a little fun with her. So far as they were concerned, she was a rich, spoiled brat who had now gotten her comeuppance.

However, despite the fact that in Aster's immaturity and fear she thought just about _everyone _the wagon went past was smirking and laughing at her, most of the people were not. Rather, it was as Daniel Wolfkiller had predicted. There were hidden pointed fingers, gasps, and whispers of "Just a girl. Not even any hairs. Can't be more than ten."

The Maestro was oblivious to this. He and Aster had psychological conditions that, though diametrically nearly opposite, sometimes had the same external effect. Aster bordered on the autistic part of the psychological spectrum. In pre-war times, she probably would have been diagnosed with Asperberger's syndrome. She cared greatly what people thought and felt, but often had a hard time _knowing _what they thought and felt, resulting in her inadvertently offending them and then having the dual problems of not knowing exactly _why _they had been offended but feeling bad that she had done so. The human proclivity for concealment and deception of emotions did not aid her in this. In fact, she probably understood animal behavior better in many ways than she did human behavior. Animals didn't lie about what they felt, or try to hide it.

The Maestro, on the other hand, had little difficulty in discerning the nuances of human emotion. He would have easily been able to tell what the people in the crowd were thinking, if he had cared. But he didn't care. So far as he was concerned, they were human rabble, and he had no more interest in paying any attention to what they might feel or think than a typical person would have in paying attention to what a bunch of scurrying ants might feel or think. So because of his lack of caring, or attention, he was literally unaware of the shock of the people that the wagon went past. After all, he had taken nude women through Dystopia, on the way to his palace before. The fact that people who, like medieval peasants before them, had resigned themselves to accepting that their liege Lord had the right to the best looking peasant women, might possibly feel differently about that same Lord abusing girls as young as Aster appeared to be, did not occur to the Maestro. Nor would he have been concerned about it even if it had occurred to him. As Aster's father had once told her, it took a very great man to retain morality, when there were no consequences for bad behavior. And the Maestro was far from being a great man, and there was no-one in Dystopia strong enough to impose consequences of any sort on him. As a result, he had lost most of whatever morality he might once have had. Which, given that he had devoted his life prior to becoming the Hulk to creating weapons of mass murder, was not all that much in the first place. And would no doubt continue to lose whatever little morality he might have left, in the future.

The streets got noticeably cleaner as the retinue approached the Maestro's palace. Those who lived or worked nearby were obviously afraid to offend the Maestro by allowing any sort of garbage in the streets that might cause a stench that would reach to the palace. The went through the public square in front of the palace, where white, clean picked skulls were still on top of tall poles. The Hulk's skull was gone, Aster noticed. The Maestro had probably destroyed it, as her father had predicted.

They went in through a side gate of the Maestro's palace, which led to a large yard full of patchy grass. Aster saw some stables, and a few horses peeking out of their stalls. There was a fenced in area with some Wardogs wandering around in a mechanical daze, and others sitting in large kennels with their pink tongues lolling out. Aster had heard that the Wardogs had a better sense of smell than even the best normal dogs, and could sniff out a person from a trail weeks old. It was one reason very few people tried to run away from the Maestro, such as she had briefly considered doing. The chances of doing so successfully were slim, at best.

As the wagon went farther in, Aster heard a snarling noise. Was one of the Wardogs angry? She looked up. In one far corner of the yard, where there was no cooling grass, and no trees for shade, she saw a tiger in the cage. The surviving one from the pair her father and Daniel Wolfkiller had trained for the Maestro. Despite it's obvious rage, it looked… awful. Pathetic even. It was obviously starving, it's stomach shrunken to nearly nothing, it's ribs and backbone showing right through the thick fur, the once magnificently curved muscles on it's four legs dwindled away to mere knotted strings. There was blood on it's mouth. Not from food. Some of it's teeth were missing, and Aster saw that one eye was swollen and dripping pus.

The tiger roared, and Aster trembled, not in fear, but in pity. If only she had Wolfkiller's rifle, she would put the poor, hurt creature out of it's misery. But she didn't have his rifle. She couldn't help the tiger. She couldn't even help herself.

The wagon came to a halt, and the Maestro fished a large key out of his pocket and used it to open the door of Aster's cage. "Come on out of there." He ordered.

Her stuffed toy tiger cub under one arm, Aster stepped out of the cage. The Maestro took her around the waist, and she steeled herself to be felt up again. But apparently he was satisfied, for the moment, with his previous violation. Several servants ran out of the palace.

"Clean her up for tonight." The Maestro ordered them. "She stinks of the zoo where she came from. And see to it that she's dressed appropriately."

The servants took her by the hand and led her down green hallways, decorated with stained glass windows and beautiful statues, much like the one she remembered from when she had visited the Hall of Fallen Heroes, a few years back. They took her into a room where there was a large green bathtub, big enough for the Maestro himself, carved from what looked like a single huge piece of dark green marble shot with white veins. Two women, wearing barely more than she did stood near it. There were bubbles on the water, which Aster didn't understand. She had never seen bubblebath before.

The soap, washrag and scrub brush on a shelf she understood. The Maestro had said she stunk and was to be clean, though in her opinion he smelled a lot worse. His hair was greasier than his stablemaster's, and that was saying a lot. She hadn't seen bugs in the Maestro's hair, but maybe that had something to do with the radiation. She remembered that the flies hadn't gone anywhere near the Hulk's head, back when it had been on one of the poles in front of the palace, because of the radiation.

Aster set down her toy tiger on the floor, got into the tub and picked up the soap. It was snatched away from her immediately by one of the women near the tub.

"The Maestro wants you properly washed." Said the woman apologetically. "We need to make sure that's done, or he'll be displeased with us."

Aster resigned herself to the humiliation of being washed, like a dirty zoo animal. Really, the very thought that she couldn't wash herself properly! Ridiculous! She'd been taking a bath by herself for as long as she could remember. Not to mention sterilizing the operating tables at the zoo, prior to surgery on any of the animals. Such as the tigers she and her father had castrated, prior to training them for the Maestro, so he could have a new toy. She recalled the condition of the surviving tiger, in the cage she had seen. The Maestro didn't take good care of his 'toys' once he got tired of them. She was under no delusions as to how long it would take for the Maestro to get tired of her, as well.

"What's your name?" She asked the woman who was scrubbing her arms with the brush.

"Betty. Betty 5." The woman smiled vacantly.

"I'm Betty 10" Said the other woman.

Aster looked at their eyes. _Drugged_. She decided. It was much what she had in mind for herself, but proof that despite the obvious wealth and beauty of the construction, decorations, and furnishing, this was not a good place. Not at all. Even if you survived the Maestro's attentions, you lost yourself. Down to your very name. Your first name was 'Betty' or whatever the Maestro said it should be, and your last name was nothing but a number.

The two women finished washing her, toweled her off, and clucked over her hair. It seemed there was little they could do to style hair as short as hers, and eventually settled for trimming it neatly with a small pair of scissors, and putting jeweled clips into it. Then she was dressed in a tunic made of nearly transparent white silk with a low neckline and slits in the short skirt that went up to her waist. She was given ornate gold chains to wear around her neck, wrists, and ankles. Aster frowned at them. They reminded her of shackles.

She was not given any underwear to wear.

"Come now. The Maestro said to bring you to the feast as soon as you were cleaned and dressed properly" Said one of the women. Was it Betty 5 or Betty 10? Aster couldn't keep them straight. Not that it really mattered.

_Things just get Betty-er and Betty-er around here, don't they?_ Came a sarcastic, unbidden thought in her head. She turned to one of the two women. "I have to use the bathroom… really bad. Is there one here? If you give me a washrag, I'll clean up good, afterwards. I promise."

"Over there." One of the two Betties pointed towards a small door. "But don't take too long. The Maestro will be displeased if you are late."

"I really got to go bad." Aster said again. "But I'll try to be as quick as I can."

She picked up Tony Tiger and carried the toy in what she hoped was a casual way towards the bathroom. Once inside, she looked around. Unlike the huge tub, it was obviously meant only for use by the Maestro's human servants. The room was far less ornate than the one with the bathtub and the toilet obviously far too small to be used by someone as large as the Maestro.

_How DID the Maestro take a crap anyways?,_ Aster wondered. She couldn't picture him just going on the ground or in a hole he dug, like the zoo animals. Did someone in Dystopia make a special, overly large sized toilet, reinforced to take his weight, or did he have to use a large bucket? Then again, she really didn't want to know. There were a lot of problems involved in being so much larger than everyone else, if you thought about it, and using a toilet was probably the least of those that really needed to worry her at the moment.

Using her teeth, she pulled at the stitches she had made last night in the tiger, until she had re-opened about two inches along the seam. She poked around with her fingers and managed to get out a small hypodermic syringe, then brought the jar of opium solution towards her until the lid was jutting partly through the opening she had made. She unscrewed the lid, and filled the syringe. Not to inject herself. Taking opium via the blood was deadly for reasons she didn't understand. It had to be taken orally, rectally, or smoked. And though she didn't want to endure what was to come, she didn't want to die. Not if there was a chance to live. No, the syringe was to accurately measure what she took. She filled it up with the solution, regarded the dark liquid, death diluted and deferred, perhaps, then held it up to her mouth, pushed the plunger, and let it trickle over her lips.

Her tongue tingled slightly and went a little numb.

She swallowed.

Taken through either the mouth or lower intestine, opium took longer to have an effect than if it were smoked. But it lasted longer, as well. Good. She didn't want the effects of it to wear off in the middle of whatever it was the Maestro was planning to do to her.

There was, of course, a problem with the dosage of opium that Aster had given herself. Opium was a crude product, at best, containing several different substances. Which was one reason why it couldn't be injected. Aster did not want to take too much of it, as she didn't want to overdose and die, but more problematic, she didn't want to render herself completely unconscious. The Maestro would not be happy with an oblivious toy, she was sure. He would either kill her on the spot, or more likely, simply wait for the opium to wear off, then rape and kill her. As a result of erring on the side of caution, she vastly underestimated how much opium she should take. She could have taken nearly twice as much, and still been moving around and talking.

Aster screwed the lid on the jar, pushed it and the syringe back into the stuffing of the tiger, then closed the gap as best she could. Hopefully, nobody would be too curious about a raggedy toy stuffed tiger. She flushed the toilet, then ran water in the sink, making sure to get the soap wet, and went back out.

"Alright. I'm ready to go now." She told the two 'Betties'. One of them took her by each hand, led her out of the bathing room, and down a few hallways to a large room with several tables filled with food and people. The air was filled with sounds of loud, happy chatter, as if this occasion were actually something to celebrate. Like a real wedding, instead a farcical prelude to a rape.

The Maestro, wearing purple velvet trousers and a metal chestplate sat at the largest table, in front of the room, with absolutely huge platter in front of him that had what looked like half an entire small roasted fawn on it, the legs dangling over the edges of the sides of the serving dish. It was surrounded by what looked like dozens of potatoes and countless mushrooms.

_My God, how can he eat the whole thing?_ Aster thought. _It's enough to feed 10 people! No wonder he was always taking animals from the Zoo to eat, if he has to eat that much all the time._

Having to eat such huge amounts, in a place and time of scarcity, was another disadvantage of the Maestro's large size. Not that it had inconvenienced the tyrant as of yet, since he simply took as much as he wanted from those who produced it, without caring whether or not his actions might cause those who produced his food to starve to death, or what he might do if and when he ran out of people to steal from. His entire mind for decades had been devoted almost entirely to serving whatever provided him with immediate (if momentary) gratification without considering such long term consequences.

The Maestro saw Aster being led in by the two 'Betties'. "Come in. Sit on my lap." He told the girl.

Aster wanted to turn and run away, but knew better. With trembling legs, she went down a center aisle of the room, between tables full of the Maestro's guests. The Maestro's lap was nearly four feet above the floor, and Aster had to use the edge of the table to pull herself up, onto it. The Maestro waited until she was settled, then felt her chest through the sheer dress with one finger.

"You've hardly got any tits. You're too thin." He said in a deep, disapproving voice. "You'd think with all the food I gave him for his animals, your father could have fed you a little better."

Aster said nothing. Her father had fed her and Thumb just fine.

_It was stolen food, though. _That had never really occurred to her before. _Food the Maestro stole from other people, farmers on the Outside. And now you're finally paying for it._

She looked at the feast in front of her. She didn't want to eat the Maestro's crummy old food. She wanted to go home, even if there was nothing there but rabbit stew or oatmeal.

The Maestro would have none of that. After Aster had just sat in his lap like a lump for over a minute, he ordered her: "Eat. You need to put on weight."

Aster's head felt a little dizzy now. The opium she had drunk was taking effect. The effect on her thoughts was like a cloth put over a lantern. The light didn't shine through clearly. The people in the room seemed to move and talk too fast. Dimly, it occurred to her that it was dangerous to eat. But she couldn't remember why. Because the food was stolen? Was it poisoned? The Maestro was eating it.

She picked up a plate, no bigger than a small saucer to the Maestro, and put a slice of venison, some mushrooms, and a baked apple stuffed with raisins onto it.

The food was delicious. It turned her stomach when she swallowed it.

Things were foggier now. The people around her seemed to move in jumps through time, as often happened in a dream. There was a big cake, with creamy yellow frosting on it. Aster took a slice. Using her silverware took a lot of concentration now.

There was something uncomfortable behind her. She had forgotten where she was sitting, on the Maestro's lap. What was poking her? Was he feeling her up again? She turned around. What was that? It wasn't the Maestro's hands, both of those were occupied with holding a leg of the roast fawn up to his mouth. So what was it? She couldn't quite see. Putting down her cake, she felt behind her with her two small hands, trying to figure out what the hell it was, jabbing into her hip. If it wasn't the Maesto's hands, what was it? A bowl? Some part of the fawn the Maestro was eating?

Aster realized just what it was at the same moment she noticed that the Maestro had set down his food and was grinning down at her. She turned pale. There was no way something that _large_ was ever going to fit inside her. It would _kill_ her. She was sure of it.

The Maestro leered at her inadvertent feel of him, through his trousers, and she saw what was under there grow even bigger. Terrified, Aster slid off the Maestro's lap.

"So you _do_ want it." He pointed towards his own crotch, where Aster had been unknowing feeling. "Nothing but a little slut, aren't you? Just like all the rest."

Aster knelt down in front of him, fearful and ashamed. She wanted to cry, but the haze of the opium seemed to keep her from that release.

"Please." She said in a broken voice. "Don't do this to me. I'll do anything. I'll be good. I won't read any more books or be Zookeeper any more, if you don't want me to."

Her pleading offers were a complete betrayal of almost everything she had ever believed in and lived for throughout her entire life, but she didn't care any more. Had the opium let her feel the true extent of fear, she undoubtedly would have lost control of her bladder.

The light tap the Maestro gave her nearly snapped Aster's neck. Red light flashed inside her head, and when she recovered, the Maestro was glaring down at her angrily.

"Won't read any more books." He said in a sneering voice. "And just what good do you think _that _will do at this point?"

He picked her up by one arm and carried her into a curtained room in the back of the feasting hall. There was a huge mattress, made of quilted silk on the floor. The Maestro threw Aster onto it, and she twisted her ankle as she fell. She screamed in pain, and the Maestro roughly tore the silk dress she wore off her body, leaving her completely exposed. Aster tried to cover herself, awkwardly, with her hands, but the opium seemed to keep her body from obeying her the way she wanted it to.

The Maestro didn't even get undressed. Nakedness equaled vulnerability in the minds of most human beings, and despite his gamma induced transformation, he was still human to the extent that he shared that belief. And under no circumstances whatsoever would he ever allow himself a moment's vulnerability in front of others. His determination never to display any weakness in front of others would eventually cost him a great deal. But for now, Aster was the one paying the price for it. The Maestro merely unbuttoned the front of his pants, freeing himself.

Aster looked at at the Maestro's cock for a moment. Hideous. Green like the rest of him, and gnarled and lumpy with far too much muscle. Gorge rose inside her, the effect not only of what she saw, but of the mistake she had made in eating food after having consumed opium orally. It was why she and her father administered it rectally in zoo animals during surgery. Vomitting could be deadly when an animal was unconscious. Aster was not unconscious, but the nausea inducing effects of opium taken into the stomach still affected her.

The Maestro spread her legs apart. Pain flared in her hip joints. Only a trained gymnast could get into the position the Maestro forced her into, without any discomfort.

Then he pushed himself into her, and the pain she felt _THEN_ made what she had felt in her ankle and hip a moment before seem like sweetness in comparison.

"NO!" Aster shrieked. "STOP! IT HURTS! GET IT OUT!"

The Maestro pulled back, and Aster sobbed, thinking he was going to show mercy, that maybe she had been punished enough now.

Then he pushed into her again. Harder, this time. Her flesh tore open and blood poured, providing grisly lubrication to her sexual violation by a monster. The Maestro grunted and pushed against her small body. The weight felt like one of the old, broken refrigerators at the zoo had fallen on top of her.

He pushed again. Three of her ribs cracked, and something wrenched the wrong way in her shoulder.

"Daddy! Please!" Aster was incoherent. "Make him stop! Make him take it out!"

Her left arm broke in two places. The Maestro bellowed with pleasure, but Aster had the small mercy of not hearing or feeling him come. Pain had finally done what the amount of opium she had taken had been insufficient to do, and rendered her unconscious.


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 8. Recovery and Salvage

Aster woke up about 6 hours later.

Perhaps the phrase 'wake up' did not accurately describe her return to consciousness. Suffice it to say that she gradually became aware. First of darkness, then of pain.

She wasn't entirely sure where she was, or exactly what had happened. She lay in the position she was, too agonized to move, in darkness as profound as that which she had once been in, in her basement, hiding from a battle between two twin giants. She couldn't even make out shapes. Or her hand in front of her. If she'd been able to move her hand. Any attempt at motion brought pain.

_What is this?_ She wondered. _Where am I? Did I fall? Am I dead?_

The possibility of being dead seemed a highly likely one, but simply being alone in the dark, in pain, was definitely not heaven, and also wasn't any sort of version of hell she had ever heard of. Then again, who was to say that hell would necessarily be what anyone expected it to be?

_If I'm dead, there's nothing I can do about it. If I'm alive, I need to find out where I am and what happened. Best to proceed on the second assumption, it can't make things worse if I'm dead, and might help if I'm alive._

She opened her mouth slightly to call out, and became aware of a sour crust around it. Her chest hurt when she tried to take a breath to call for help, and her mouth was too parched to speak, anyways.

She lay there for several more minutes. Beyond the darkness and the pain, nothing seemed to be happening. So wherever she was, and whatever had occurred, she was probably in no immediate danger. She licked her lips (her tongue being one of the few parts of her body that didn't hurt to some degree) to get rid of the dry sourness around her lips. The taste was familiar. Apparently she'd vomited at some point. Why?

She couldn't see, but her other senses such as taste were working. She tried taking several shallow breaths, rapidly. It hurt slightly less than her attempt at taking a deep breath. She tried to think. What could she tell about where she was?

She could feel something soft underneath and around her. She wasn't lying on a bare floor. But it wasn't grass, either. Probably she was inside. There wasn't any hint of wind against her skin, which confirmed that assessment.

There were a few sounds. Distant voices. The clatter of machinery. Smells, too. Smelly sweat and some sort of animal musk. The heavy scent of a variety of rich food.

_Food._ She thought. Then she remembered. The horrible mockery of a wedding feast. The damned Maestro and what he had done to her. Bloody damn hell. Her thought of being dead and in hell was _half_ right at any rate.

_I shouldn't have eaten with opium in my stomach._ Aster shook her head at her own stupidity. But the Maestro had ordered her to eat. Something about her tits or something. And by that point she wasn't thinking clearly.

Something was wet between her legs, and she cried out in disgust, fearing that it was the Maestro's filthy seed all over her. Her right arm seemed to hurt less than the left, and she reached down to feel what it was. It was warm and wet, and seemed thinner than the animal sperm that she had often collected. There was an awful lot of it, too.

_What is this? I don't care if that fucking green bastard is ten feet tall, I don't think he can come that much. And even if he had, it ought to be cold by now. Something isn't right. I need light. There was a curtain across the opening to this room. I've got to find it. Maybe there's still some lights in that dining hall._

Aster reached outward and upwards with her good arm, sweeping it in a circle, as far as she could reach. To her right, and behind her, her fingers barely brushed cloth.

It hurt to move her legs, and one of her ankles was especially painful. She pushed with the other foot, sliding herself across slick fabric, towards the curtain. She couldn't move her left arm at all. Well, she could, but the very attempt brought agony along the whole length of it. She didn't have enough strength of will to ignore that degree of pain. How was she to do this?

Carefully, she slid one toe under the curtain and lifted it slightly. She was as weak as a kitten, and didn't understand why. The fabric felt like it weighed nearly 50 lbs. Still, there were a few lights still lit in the dining area, and now she could see herself. She wished she hadn't. She looked like the victim of a chariot accident she had once seen in the market in Dystopia. There were bruises everywhere on her body., especially along one side of her ribcage and her left arm. The bones were probably broken underneath. Not good. There was no way for her to set and splint them herself.

Her foot trembling with the effort, she turned her attention to what had been worrying her a few moments before. That odd wetness between her legs. What was it. She reached down with her right hand into her crotch, got some of the wetness on her fingers, and brought it up to her face.

Her entire hand was covered with dark liquid, nearly black in the dim light.

_Blood!_ The panicked thought hit her like a bucket of ice water. _So much. There's got to be nearly a pint on me already. And I'm still bleeding! Otherwise it wouldn't be warm and liquid like that, it would be clotted already. I've got to do something. I only weigh a little over 100 lbs. If I don't stop this, I'll bleed to DEATH!_

_What to do! What, what what! Think!_ Aster began hyperventilating, and the panic made her heart beat faster, which unfortunately had the effect of actually increasing the rate of bleeding from the soft tissues that the Maestro had torn with his brutal rape of her. Luckily, however, the accompanying adrenaline also cleared the last remnants of the opium out of her head. Several solutions flashed through her head in less than a second, and were quickly rejected. Stitches, cauterization, pre-War superglue were all impossible. _What else? Think Aster! Think or die! Pressure and bandages, maybe. I haven't got anything sterile, but if I get an infection, I'll have a couple weeks at least to figure out how to deal with it. Right now I have to stop this blood RIGHT NOW!_

Using her right hand, Aster felt around on the fabric covered floor until she came up with a large scrap of something or the other. In point of fact, it was actually the remains of the sheer dress that the Maestro had forced her to wear during the feast, but she neither knew nor cared about that now. All she cared about is that it was there, and she could use it. Using her mouth and her good right hand, she twisted one end of it into a point. Then she pushed the point up into her vagina. It HURT! Not as bad as when the Maestro had violated her, but bad enough. She almost pulled it out again, then stopped. She put the other end of the silken dress into her mouth in a wadded bunch, and bit on it and her lip at the same time. Then she pushed the other end of the cloth farther into herself. She screamed against the gag. And pushed more cloth into her torn body.

Eventually, she couldn't seem to get any more of the fabric up into herself. She was panting, and sweat covered her face, loosening the crust of vomit a little. She used the end of the cloth that she had been biting on, now dampened with her saliva, to wipe her face a little. Sometime during her attempts to stanch the bleeding with cloth, her foot had come out from under the curtain, so she couldn't see if she was still bleeding, or not. She didn't have any more strength left to try to raise the heavy, heavy fabric again to look. No matter. It had either worked, or not. Either way, there was nothing more she could do to help herself at this point, and looking to see if she was still bleeding from down there would not alter the facts.

Aster wasn't sure what else to do. She didn't know if she had stopped the bleeding or not. If she had, trying to move might start it up again, and she'd die. If she hadn't, then she needed to try to find help and if she stayed here, she'd die. On the other hand, either staying here OR moving (assuming she even _could_ move any significant distance with her injuries) might displease the Maestro, and he'd rape her again as a punishment. She was pretty sure she wouldn't survive a second round with that monster. At least, not until she healed up, if she ever did.

Probably the Maestro being the Maestro, he'd find a reason to be displeased with her regardless of _what_ she did or didn't do. That being the case, Aster decided to stay where she was. The odds of death seemed about equal to her regardless of whether she stayed or tried to find help, and moving was painful. So painful that the odds of finding help probably weren't very good, either.

She groaned loudly in pain for several moments, then went silent again. Groaning took too much effort. She lay back. Time seemed to jump oddly again, as it had when she had been on the opium before. Was the drug still in her system? Or was she blacking out from pain and exhaustion? She heard the rumbling sound of machinery a few times, and once, a few voices in the distance.

"Hello?" her voice was barely audible. "Somebody? Is anyone there? Help me. Please."

The voices faded. _Of course_ they couldn't here her when she could barely speak above a whisper. She tried to pucker her lips to whistle, but the dry crust of vomit somehow got in the way of her doing that.

Time seemed to fade out again, and Aster wasn't sure how much went by before she heard footsteps. The seemed to get louder, approaching the curtained alcove where she lay.

_Oh no! What if it's the Maestro again?!_ Aster whimpered in panic.

Then the curtains were pushed back, and the light of a Pre-War flashlight shone through. Aster squinted, but couldn't see who it was holding it. Whoever it was didn't look as tall as the Maestro, but she wasn't sure.

"Bloody hell." The voices sounded vaguely familiar. "You're still alive? You're so damned short. I thought for sure the Maestro would kill you."

"Father…" No, it wasn't her father. The comment about her shortness identified the speaker. "Wolfkiller… is that you?"

"Yes." The dark haired man still smelled bad, but no-where near as bad as the Maestro had. He set down his flashlight on a blanket, where the beam angled down to illuminate Aster's nude, battered body. "Damn, you're a mess. I've seen worse, though. You might be short, but you're tough."

Aster snorted. She didn't _feel _tough. She felt like she'd been trampled by one of the extinct elephants that used to live in the Zoo before the war.

"How…" she pressed her right hand to where her ribs ached whenever she took in too large a breath. "How the hell could it be worse than this?"

"Trust me." Wolfkiller said in a grim voice. "It could be. For one thing… he had trouble… getting it up. He had to get drunk, first, and even then he had trouble."

The thought of the Maestro suffering from so human a frailty as occasional impotence made Aster laugh. She winced with the pain, and cut off the laughter. "He didn't seem like he had any trouble.. with that.. to me."

Wolfkiller spread his hands helplessly. "Trust me… he did. You're actually not his type."

Aster started crying. Not even his 'type' whatever that was, and the Maestro had still done this to her. For what? To prove what? The Maestro had been angry with her, apparently for being smarter than him. But how the hell did his raping and nearly killing her prove that he was smarter than her? It didn't prove anything except that he was stronger. And that she already knew, and wouldn't have tried arguing with or complaining about any more than she would complain about the fact that a horse was stronger than her. What would be the point to deny the glaringly obvious? Nor would raping or beating up the horse change that fact, either.

Disgust spread over the scarred man's face at the tears. "I did warn you to keep it under your hat."

That just made Aster cry worse.

Daniel Wolfkiller sighed. "It was probably pointless to warn you. You're brilliant, but you've got… pieces missing from you. And too brilliant, probably. You can hide candle under a hat, maybe. But you… might as well try to hide a bonfire under a hat. But I did try."

Aster suddenly hated all men. "Yeah, that worked real good. Now what are you going to do. Have a big laugh at how stupid I am and then go off and let me die? Or rape me yourself?"

"Stupid girl." Wolfkiller looked like he wanted to slap her, probably _would _have slapped her if she hadn't already been so badly hurt. "You aren't _MY_ type either. I like women, not little girls. Which you're plenty nosey and smart enough to know. I didn't bother you or your sister, did I? You might have had the manners to return the favor and keep out of _MY _business."

He left the alcove, and Aster started crying again. A moment later there were some scraping sounds that she couldn't identify. Was that Wolfkiller? What was he doing, devising some new torment for her? There was a louder scrape, then a 'thud', and a moment later, Wolfkiller came back into the alcove, dragging a small, upended table behind him.

"I need to get you onto this." He told Aster. "It's going to hurt like hell. I'd suggest you try not to scream."

"Where are you taking me?"

"There's a fairly good hospital, here in the palace. From what I can tell in this light, they can probably help you. Consider yourself lucky."

Aster didn't feel very lucky, and wondered for a moment what happened to those women who weren't so lucky. Then she was being slid onto the hard undersurface of the table, and the pain in her arms and ribs flared bright red, so bad she blacked out again for a moment. When she recovered, there was a blanket on top of her, and Wolfkiller was pulling the table down the hallway. The lower part of her legs hung out past the edge of the wooden surface, and her heels dragged on the floor, hurting her ankle terribly.

It was dark, and it seemed like the hallways in the palace were endless. She knew that the Maestro's palace was huge, but other than the bathing and dining areas, and the Hall of Fallen Heroes, had never really seen any of it.

There was a trip up an elevator, in which Wolfkiller had to slant the table slightly in order to fit it inside, causing Aster to whimper with more pain as her weight went onto her broken ribs. They went up several floors, then down another dim hallway into a room that was brightly lit. The table Aster was on was too wide to fit through the door, so Wolfkiller left her in the hallway while he went in. A Doctor in a white coat sitting at a desk near the entrance started as Wolfkiller came up to him.

"Get up, Llewellyn" The stablemaster ordered the doctor abruptly. "I've got a patient for you."

The doctor, whose name was Matthew Llewellyn looked through the door, and saw the shape of Aster's body lying there on the table. He dashed out, crouched down near the table, peeled back the blanket covering her with clinical efficiency, and took in the extent of her injuries quickly.

"Not good. Several broken bones. Soft tissue injuries. Sprained ankle and hip. What happened…?" he knew Wolfkiller was the Maestro's stablemaster. "This doesn't look like she was trampled by a horse."

"No. It was _him_."

"Bloody hell." The doctor was painfully familiar with the uses to which the Maestro put women, and the brutal aftereffects. "Would have been better off being trampled by a horse. Poor child. She can't be more than ten. What the hell is he thinking?"

"She's fourteen actually." Wolfkiller corrected him.

"Never mind." Said the doctor. "I've got to get her on a stretcher. Help me. I'm the only one here this time of night."

He got up, went back into the small hospital, and came out with a stretcher. He laid it on the ground next to the table. Then he took a small screwdriver out of his pocket and removed the two legs of the table that were on the same side as the stretcher, so they wouldn't get in the way of moving Aster. "Take her by the hips and help me slide her over. I don't want to twist her body, in case she has a broken back. In fact, you probably should have left her where she was and called me down to help you move her."

"Well, _excuse me_ for not wanting her to bleed to death." Said Wolfkiller in a disgruntled voice. "I don't have a fancy medical degree like you."

"Never mind." The doctored sighed. Most people didn't know any better and it was pointless to argue with them about it. He took Aster by the shoulders, and turned to the other man. "Roll her over onto the stretcher on the count of three. Ready? One, two, three!"

Aster was rolled over, and the motion hurt her ribs again. She cried out, once, then she was on the stretcher, panting with pain. Someone, she wasn't sure if it was the doctor or Wolfkiller, put the blanket back over her.

"Pick up that end of the stretcher." The doctor told the stablemaster. "Let's get her inside onto the table. I need to look at her in better light."

Even the jars of the two men's footsteps, not coordinated with eachother, sent spasms of pain through Aster. It felt like she was nearly _slammed_ onto the examining table, though she was actually set down as gently as the two men could manage. Then the doctor took the blanket off her, and with expert hands and eyes examined her injuries.

"Hmm. Fourteen, you said?" He glanced up at Wolfkiller. "She's small for her age. Not stunted from malnutrition like I first thought. A slow developer, it looks like. Probably made her injuries worse, but in a way, she's lucky."

Aster failed to understand why that was 'lucky' if it made her injuries worse. The doctor took out a light and shined it in her eyes.

"Good pupil response. A bit slow, but no obvious brain injuries." He addressed Aster for the first time. "I'm Doctor Llewellyn. Can you tell me your name?"

Her mouth was still dry and crusted with vomit. "Aster. Aster Aversa."

"You're the Zookeeper's daughter!" The doctor seemed a bit surprised for a moment, then went back to his medical routine. "Aster, your eyes aren't responding to light as fast as they should. Have you been drinking alcohol, or taking any drugs?"

"Opium…" it seemed like a lifetime ago and she had to struggle to remember. "Ingested orally."

The doctor's brow furrowed. Odd language to come from such a young looking girl. But it wasn't important. "How much? How long ago."

She tried, but couldn't remember. "I forget. Before the feast."

"Well, it doesn't matter. If it were a lethal dose, it would have killed you by now." He thought to himself that the girl probably would have been far better off taking a lethal dose. But maybe she didn't know how much would be deadly. And perhaps it wasn't his decision to make.

Doctor Llewellyn went over to a counter where an old, pre-War book lay open. He picked it up and turned to the girl. "Aster, I'm going to show you something, and I want you to tell me what letter you see."

He flipped the book over quickly, so that Aster could see a page with a picture and showed it to her. She glanced at it quickly and told him: "I see a bunch of letter 'H's."

"I see." From things that Daniel Wolfkiller had mentioned about the girl, he had expected such an answer, but had to make sure.

He set the book back down, turned back to Aster. "Aster, you've got three broken ribs, your left arm is broken in two places, and your ankle and hips are sprained."

He looked down at the blood encrusted cloth between her legs. "Did Daniel Wolfkiller put that cloth down there, where you were bleeding?" It didn't seem likely that the Maestro would bother with such a thing, but he supposed it was possible.

"No… I did."

"You did… well." The girl might be small, but she was damned resourceful. Her Zookeeper father had obviously spent a lot of time and effort on her education. Wasted time, unfortunately, it would seem.

"I'm going to have to leave that cloth for right now." The doctor said. "If I take it out, you'll probably start bleeding again, and right now I don't think you can afford to lose any more blood. But I need to get your bones set. I'm going to give you a shot that will put you out for a while, do you understand."

"Yes."

"Good." The doctor took out a syringe, took it over to a large shelf with some jars, pulled on off, and filled the needle. He found a vein in the elbow of Aster's unbroken right arm, and gave her an injection.

"How long does it take to work?" She asked the doctor.

"Count to a hundred. Out loud." He suggested.

"Alright." Aster began counting. "One. Two. Three…

She got to seventeen, and everything went black.

It seemed only a moment later that there was light. Aster looked around. She was lying on a rather hard bed, the sun shining through a small window near the ceiling. There was a cast on her left arm, and another on her ankle. There was a pitcher of water, a glass, a mirror, and an odd thing like a button attached to a wire on a small table nearby.

She sat up, and rubbed her face. The crust of vomit had been washed off while she had been unconscious. She looked down at herself, and she was wearing an odd sort of lightweight white tunic that didn't seem to close right in the back. Useless, whatever it was. Both for modesty, and keeping warm.

Aster picked up the mirror and looked at herself. Her face was one large bruise, and there was another one going down from her collarbone to her chest, where the doctor said she had broken ribs. He had mentioned her hips were sprained. She lifted up the blankets and looked under the idiot white tunic she was wearing, but quickly looked away from what she saw under there.

_How do I get the doctor in here?_ She wondered. Probably the button with the wire coming out of it, she doubted that it had been put there just for decoration. She had seen Pre-war switches that looked like buttons, so probably the button was a switch for a light or a bell or something in whatever room the doctor had gone into. She reached over, hooked it with one finger, then pressed it. There was a ringing in another room that lasted several seconds, followed by the sound of footsteps, and in less than a minute, the doctor came into her room, carrying a metal clipboard full of crisp white paper under his arm. Aster thought at first it was Pre-war paper, but it seemed too white for that. Probably made somewhere in the Maestro's palace, then. Some things of Pre-War technology were still made her. Not very many, though. Certainly not enough for everyone in Dystopia to have.

"Ah, you're awake. Earlier than I expected."

"What time is it?" Aster shook her head blearily. Maybe that wasn't the right question. It seemed a lifetime ago since she had been taken from her nice home at the zoo and paraded naked in a cage through the streets of Dystopia. "What day is it?"

"Good. Lucid questions. Probably no brain damage. Do you remember my name, from before?"

Aster thought for a moment. "Doctor Llewellyn."

"Good. No short term memory loss." The doctor pulled out his clipboard and made some notes on it. He looked back up at his young patient. "You have some pretty bad injuries, Aster. I think I mentioned them to you before, but you were in a lot of pain then, and might have forgotten. Your left arm is broken in two places. You have three broken ribs. Your ankle and hip are both sprained. If you stay off your feet as much as possible for a couple weeks, the sprains should heal up. I'm going to recommend to the Maestro that you remain here for that time."

Aster bit her lip. "Do you think he'll listen?"

Doctor Llewellyn ignored that and went on. "The cast can come off your arm in eight weeks. There's no way to put a cast on your ribs, but they should heal up by themselves provided you don't do anything strenuous for eight weeks, as well.

_Like getting raped by that bastard, again._ Aster thought.

The doctor continued reading down what he had written, and frowned. "You had some very bad injuries in… well… where you were raped. I cleaned you up, stopped the bleeding, and applied some antibiotics, but there wasn't that much I could do to repair the damage. You're going to have some bad scarring inside you. Most likely, sex.. . with anyone… is going to be at least somewhat uncomfortable to you. I don't know if you can still have children or not. I'd suggest you don't try, unless you have access to myself or another doctor who can perform a cesearean. Giving birth will probably kill you."

A thought occurred to the doctor. "Do you know what a cesearean is?"

Aster drew a finger across her lower stomach. "My father did one once, on a goat. It died a couple days later, but the baby lived."

"Mmm." The doctor nodded. Either complications from the hard birth or infection could have killed the mother goat. "I'd actually recommend that you get a hysterectomy… your uterus and ovaries removed… to make sure you never get pregnant. I can do that here, if you want me to."

Aster shook her head. The thought of having more injuries, from the surgery, to recover from, along with what she already had, was too much to deal with. Besides, after her sickening experience with the Maestro, she had no intention of ever voluntarily touching a man, or letting one touch her. Ever.

"Well, it's up to you." The doctor shrugged, and his tone made it clear that he disagreed with Aster's decision. "I can't do it without your consent."

Aster felt resentful at Doctor Llewellyn's patronizing attitude. It must be wonderful to be a man, like him, and get to rape people and not have to worry about being raped.

"Why didn't you just let me die?" She sulked. "What do you do around here, anyways? The Maestro rips women apart and you put them back together again, so he can do it all over again?"

Doctor Llewellyn slammed down his clipboard. "Mister Wolfkiller told me that you were a rather rude and foolish girl. Brilliant, obviously. But still rude and foolish."

"Oh, I'm rude?" Aster sneered. "I'm not the one working for a sick giant green pig!"

"Do you honestly think I have very much choice about that? None of us around here have much choice about what we do. Or we choose to protect ourselves, and our own families. Don't tell me you wouldn't do the same thing. If I could change things, believe me, I would. If I could undo what happened to you last night, I would. But I can't. Now grow up and deal with it, or you won't live long enough to grow up."

"Fuck you." Aster had only very seldom used what she thought of as the 'F' word before in her life, but the very rude doctor deserved it. So did that horrible Daniel Wolfkiller with his dirty hair. And the Maestro. And all men. Except maybe her father.

"Well, that's a truly brilliant answer." Said Doctor Llewellyn sarcastically. "Wolfkiller gave you some advice, a few years ago. You probably weren't smart enough then, to follow it. Maybe you are, now. Don't attract too much attention to yourself. Learn to keep your eyes and ears open, and your mouth shut. Then, just maybe, you'll survive around here."

"Whatever." Aster curled up on her side, the side without the broken ribs and closed her eyes, tears trickling through the lids.

The doctor shook his head. "I have to leave for a while. I've been working nearly 16 hours. I need to go home and get some sleep. There'll be a nurse in the other room. If you need anything, press that button again, and she'll get it for you."

Aster refused to respond, other than to pull the blankets over her head, so the doctor could only see a few tufts of her short hair, on top. One of the jeweled clips that had been put into it the previous night was still there. Almost tenderly, the doctor took it out, regarded it for a moment, then put it in his pocket. He doubted if the girl would want it, and the gems in it looked real. It would fetch a good price, and he had several uses for the money.

After leaving the hospital, the Doctor did not go straight home. Instead he went to a small park, lined with withered oak trees which were large enough to perhaps have been growing before the War. He sat down on a weathered wooden bench, missing one slat in the back, far away from the few other people in the park at the time. Then he took out a slim medical book from his satchel, opened it up and read it while he waited. Within a few minutes, Daniel Wolfkiller came from another direction and sat down near him.

The doctor continued to pretend to read his medical book.

"Well?" said the Maestro's stablemaster. "What do you think of her?"

"Lucky to be alive." Said Doctor Llewellyn. "Luckier still that most of her injuries are going to heal. The opium she took probably helped. It relaxed her muscles, made the injuries less severe than they otherwise might have been."

"I told you she was resourceful." Said Wolfkiller. "So you agree I was right."

"Oh, she's brilliant." Agreed the doctor. "You also told me she was rude. That's true as well. She'd best learn not to be, at least in front of the Maestro."

"She's got some pieces missing." Wolfkiller explained. "I don't know why. Probably too many animals and not enough people around her, when she was growing up."

"Maybe. Or maybe she has too many pieces. That can be just as problematic, in some ways."

"What do you mean?" Wolfkiller often couldn't keep up mentally, with the physician.

"You know horses." Said the doctor. "You tell me, what good would it do for a horse to have eight legs instead of four? Especially if the extra four legs were pointed sideways, or straight up, instead of at the ground."

"I don't know." Shrugged the stablemaster. "Running upside-down, maybe?"

The doctor said nothing for a while. "I did a simple test on her. The answer she gave... wasn't what most people would give. I've read about cases like hers in old books. Pre-War books, I mean. At that time, they probably would have called her 'autistic'. But from what I can tell, that never was a very accurate term. The people who lived before the war applied it to all sorts of different behaviors, some of which were actually complete opposites. From what I can tell, what they generally meant by it most of the time was that someone wouldn't pay whatever amount of attention to various other people that the other people felt they should be paying. Which in itself makes the incredibly arrogant assumption that the other people were necessarily even WORTH paying attention to, and the obviously mistaken assumption that they somehow had a right to attention, even if they were worth it."

"I still think we can use her." Said Wolfkiller. "You told me yourself, last night, that the way she saved her life, bandaging herself with that dress, was more resourceful than most adults."

"Then you'll use her as a tool." The doctor was obviously uncomfortable with the idea. "A fourteen year old girl, who was raped by a monster."

"Better a tool, than a toy." Said Wolfkiller.

The doctor didn't like it, but didn't protest. Unpleasant as the idea was, Wolfkiller was right. Children abused and threw away their toys out of fickleness and cruelty. Adults didn't break or throw away tools. Not so long as they were still useful. But still…

"I still don't like it. To use a hurt young girl like that. Even if she is rude. She's been through so much."

"Do you have a better idea? She's incredibly observant. And who gets closer to the Maestro, close enough to spot some possible weakness he might have, than the women he keeps around?" Wolfkiller waited for a moment and went on. "I can't undo what was done to her, or prevent what's going to happen to her. And if someone doesn't find a way to stop him, he'll hurt other girls like her. Nothing you or I do can help her, but using her might save others."

"Yes, but how are we going to get her to help us?" asked the doctor. "She's a fourteen year old girl, for pities sake. We _CAN'T _tell her what we're about. She wouldn't last a minute under torture. Hell, she hates you and doesn't like me much better, if we ask her to help us, she'd probably run straight to the Maestro and tell him just to get the chance to go home. He'd have her head on a spike right next to ours, but she's too naïve to understand that."

Wolfkiller looked at the oak trees near them for a minute. It seemed they grew less leaves every year, and the leaves that did grow seemed stunted and yellowed. He wondered if he would live to see a year when the trees sprouted no leaves at all, and what their city would be like, then.

"I don't need to ask her." He finally said. "And she'll help us without knowing she is, specifically because she hates me."

The doctor was nonplussed. "And what, exactly, will accomplish that miracle?"

"Miracle?" Wolfkiller chuckled. "No… not a miracle. Pride."


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter 9. The Green Jungle

The next day, around ten in the morning. Doctor Llewellyn came back to see Aster in the small hospital he ran inside the Maestro's palace the following day. Aster had eaten a breakfast of oatmeal, eggs, and orange juice the nurse had brought her a few hours earlier, and since then had been thinking about the palace while she lay on the bed. It was almost like a small city, inside the larger city of Dystopia. Which in turn, was surrounded by the Outside, and past that, toxic wastelands where supposedly nothing (or very little) survived. The palace had the most wealth, and the most remnants of the best technology from before the war, and as you moved farther from it, the wealth and level of technology declined. It reminded her of something. From a math book, maybe? It was hard to think with the pain all over her body.

Aster saw that the grey haired doctor had a sour face when he entered her room, and thought perhaps he was still mad at her about her rudeness of the previous day. Most things other people thought of as rude tended to go over her head, and even when they didn't, she generally didn't dwell on them for more than a few minutes. But during the past few years she had gradually become aware of the fact - though she didn't really understand it - that other people sometimes tended to nurse grudges for a long time over things she thought of as minor, and contrawise, often cared little or nothing about things that offended her greatly.

But whatever was bothering Doctor Llewellyn didn't seem to be related to her. A few seconds after he entered, the sour expression left his face, and he began reading from his clipboard. He nodded after a few moments.

"Apparently you did fairly well last night." He commented. "No fever, no vomiting. Used the bathroom twice. Good. Are you in any pain?"

"Some." Aster admitted.

"Well, that's to be expected. Is there any itching in your broken arm or ribs?"

"No."

"Well, there probably will be within several days, as the bones start healing. I won't tell you not to scratch, but try not to press too hard when you do, or break the skin. How bad is the pain?"

Aster thought. The worst injuries she had had previously in her life had been scraped elbows and knees. And of course the time she got bit by Stubs, when she had trained the lynx to jump through a hoop. That seemed a lifetime ago. A different life, almost. Was the bite worse? It had definitely hurt MUCH worse than the bite last night, when the Maestro was raping her and seemed to be ripping her very body apart in the process, but she couldn't recall the pain of the bite well enough to really compare it to what she was feeling now. Her insides, between her legs, actually hurt worse than her broken bones did.

"I don't know." she finally said. "It hurts bad enough that it's kind of hard to think."

"For you, that's probably fairly bad." Doctor Llewellyn said dryly. "I'm going to start you on taking some codeine for the pain."

"Codeine… that's one of the parts of opium, isn't it?" Aster remembered her father talking about the components of opium. He didn't have any way to separate the raw drug into the separate components at the zoo. But apparently they did, in the Maestro's palace.

"Yes." Doctor Llewellyn had never met a patient who knew that before, but he was rapidly ceasing to be surprised at anything Aster knew. It seemed like the girl must have read her way through at least half of the books in Dystopia's library before ending up here. "It's safer than raw opium, it probably won't make you vomit. If you do experience any vomiting or other side effects, let me know immediately."

He went out and came back with a large brown bottle with a funny shaped cap, like an oversized cut. "For someone your size, one capful should be enough. Fill it up three times a day, at six to eight hour intervals. It should help with the pain, while you're healing. I'll give you more, when this bottle is empty."

"What about when I leave here?" Aster asked. "The nurse last night said that I would probably have to leave as soon as I could walk, but you said that would be in a few weeks, and my broken bones will take longer than that to heal, won't they?"

"I'll give you a bottle to take with you when you leave, and you can come back when you need more." Doctor Llewellyn explained. Medication of any sort in the post-War world might be scarce, and many were not available at all, but there was no longer any bureaucratic nonsense of prescriptions. The doctor was, of course, well aware that codeine, like all opium derivatives, was highly addictive, but he wasn't going to leave a fourteen year old victim of the worst possible rape he could imagine in the sort of pain her injuries would cause her for the next few months. No matter how rude she was. Besides, he wasn't entirely sure he agreed with Daniel Wolfkiller's proposal to somehow get the girl to use her position close to the Maestro to try and find any possible weaknesses, even small ones, in the brute. Wolfkiller had a point, that unless the Maestro were stopped, somehow, more girls like this one would keep suffering just as bad, or worse, in the future. But it still didn't seem fair. Giving Aster the option of living out whatever undoubtedly short amount was left of her life in a drug induced fog, if that's what she wanted, seemed almost a mercy.

Really? What was the stable master going to tell her? _Sorry, Aster. Sorry you didn't get to live out your dream of running the zoo. Sorry that you're going to spend the next few years being used as a sex toy by a half-ton monster, and probably some of his favorite guards as well. And we won't risk ourselves to help you, but we'd really like you to do us a favor, anyways. Can you put yourself in worse danger by spying on the Maestro for us? See if he has any weak points and let us know? See, you might be only fourteen, but you're about the only fuck toy the Maestro has with more than half a brain. Not to mention anywhere near enough education to let you know the __**sorts **__of things to look for, Mind you, he'll probably notice your spying sooner or later, and publicly rape you to death for it, as an object lesson, but we'd like you to do it anyways. In order to save people who you don't know, or who haven't been born yet, and who won't ever know what you did or be grateful. How about it? Sound good to you?_

It certainly didn't sound good to Doctor Llewellyn. He certainly wouldn't have done such a thing, even for someone he liked. And Wolfkiller said that Aster most emphatically disliked him intensely. So how the hell was he planning to get her to go along with such a thing?

An unpleasant thought occurred to the doctor. Hell, that jerk Wolfkiller had better not be planning to threaten the girl's family to get her cooperation. It sounded like just the ruthless sort of thing the man would do, but it was not only immoral, it was an abysmally stupid idea. Aster's first thought if Wolfkiller tried something like that would probably be to go straight to the Maestro. She was a fourteen year old girl, for heaven's sake, and a socially awkward one at that, despite her brilliance. Doctor Llewellyn had read various pre-War adventure books when he was a boy, which featured adults (generally portrayed in an artificially stupid fashion) bringing young children into their confidence regarding all their secret plans to defeat some villian or the other. The books were meant for children, and were entertaining, but completely unrealistic. The world did not work that way. Wars were fought, and won by adults, for the sake of future children, but any child unfortunate enough to live during a war, even if they were somehow necessary to victory, were pawns, at best. Something to be used and sacrificed, without ever knowing why. Even brilliant children, like Aster. And pawns in war seldom became queens. Not like in chess.

It took about three weeks of bed rest for Aster's sprained ankle and hips to heal to the point that Doctor Llewellyn felt it was safe for her to walk on them. Every few days, the Maestro would ask him (though thankfully, not in the hospital where his presence would no doubt further terrify Aster) when Aster was going to be able to 'grace him with her presence again'. Doctor Llewellyn wasn't sure what to think of that. According to Daniel Wolfkiller, the Maestro had actually suffered from a remarkably human problem, impotence, with Aster, and had to get drunk before he was physically able to rape her. It seemed rather unlikely that the Maestro would want to repeat what was surely as humiliating an experience for him as it was for any man, but who knew what the brute was thinking. He obviously had been completely insane for a very long time. Hopefully he just wanted to make Aster miserable by forcing the girl to be around him and dress immodestly in public, though it was always possible he simply meant to kill her.

For Aster, the three weeks went by rather quickly. The codeine seemed to have much the same effect on her as the opium had. Time went by quickly, almost seeming to jump, or even leap, at times. Some days, she'd eat breakfast, and the next thing she knew, it was dark outside, and either Doctor Llewellyn or his nurse were helping her to the toilet prior to her going to bed. Sometimes the nurse would put her in a sort of a chair with two giant wheels and two small ones, and bring her into the front room of the hospital, so Aster could talk with her, but she never seemed to remember their conversations afterwards. Sometimes she closed her eyes, and she didn't think she was asleep, but there were pictures like dreams inside her eyelids, so maybe she was. Once, another patient, a man, was brought in. Aster remembered that half his arm was missing, and that she had asked Doctor Llewellyn what had happened to the man, but the next thing she knew, it was a day (or maybe more than a day, she wasn't sure) later, and the man was gone, and she couldn't remember what Doctor Llewellyn had said had happened to the man.

There was a big shelf all full of pre-War medical books in the hospital, which Aster sometimes saw Doctor Llewellyn reading. Once she asked him if she could read a book, and he let her, but the words, which other times always would get filed away into a thousand different places in her brain, just seemed to slip through like water though a sieve. Her eyes read the words, and she flipped the pages, but couldn't remember what she had read a few minutes ago. She tried reading some of the books a few more times, but then gave up.

Being on the codeine made the three weeks go by quickly, and towards the end, Doctor Llewellyn had Aster doing some exercises in bed and stand and walk for short periods of time. Finally he told her that she didn't need to be in the hospital any more, so he was going to have her brought to the large room where all the Maestro's women stayed. He gave Aster a sheet of instructions for exercises to do, and told her to try not to walk or be on her feet any more than she had to. Then he handed her the large bottle of codeine that she was taking. The nurse brought in Aster's stuffed tiger, which she'd gotten from somewhere, and in a daze, Aster put it under one arm. Such toys seemed like they belonged to a different person now, and she wasn't really sure what she would do with it. Then, though she was wearing nothing but her hospital gown that was nearly impossible to close in back, Doctor Llewellyn brought her into the front room of the hospital, where a woman wearing a nearly transparent green, silk dress was waiting.

"I'm Betty 5" The woman smiled in an artificial way, as if she practiced it in front of the mirror frequently. "Perhaps you remember me, Betty. I gave you a bath."

Something was wrong in what the woman had said. Being on codeine as she was, it took Aster several moments to figure out what it was. Finally it occurred to her. "My name is Aster. Not Betty."

"No, we're all Betty here." Said Betty 5. "You're Betty, too. Well, Betty 23, actually. There used to be another Betty 23, but she died some time ago, so that's who you are, now."

Betty 5's eyes seemed frightened. Aster shook her head muzzily. Her name was Aster, wasn't it? Why was it Betty, now? "Betty… I don't know." Her mind used to be like a clock with a million perfectly meshed and oiled gears. Now it seemed like oatmeal full of disconnected lumps.

"You'll see." Said Betty 5. "I'm to take you to the room where we all stay. There's plenty of room, you can pick out any place in it you like to be your own corner."

Betty 5 led Aster out of the hospital and down several hallways. Or was she Betty 23 now? It seemed like the Maestro liked to take away the names of all the women he had, and made them all be called 'Betty'. Arguing the point probably wouldn't be safe. Arguing with the Maestro about _anything_, probably wouldn't be safe.

Eventually, the pair went through a large arched doorway with green, faceted rectangles made of glass set around the outside of it. A guard with a rifle, much more modern looking than the one Daniel Wolfkiller owned, stood on one side of it. He recognized Betty 5 and waved her in, but blocked Aster with one hand.

"Name?" the guard demanded.

Aster squinted. Did she have a different name? She couldn't remember a few minutes ago, back in the hospital. Finally she answered. "Aster."

Betty 5 turned. "Betty!" she reminded Aster.

"Yes… Betty." Aster glanced nervously at the rifle. A bullet would kill her just as dead as the Maestro could. "Betty… I forget my number."

"A new one, huh?" The guard looked Aster over. "Awfully young, isn't she? Has he already…?"

"Three weeks ago." Said Betty 5, a little sadly. "She's fourteen, though."

"Hmm." The guard grunted. There had been a few other girls that young, taken from their parents by the Maestro. This one _looked_ younger though. Well, he wasn't going to argue. There was a clipboard, similar to the one that Doctor Llewellyn used, sitting on the floor near a chair where the guard sometimes sad, and he picked it up.

"Your number is 23." He told Aster. "That's your name, now. Betty 23. Try to remember it, or you'll get into trouble. And I don't like trouble, and _HE_ doesn't like trouble. Which means you'd best not cause any."

"I… I won't" Aster meant the promise at the time.

"Good." The guard waved his hand at her. "Go on in, then."

Aster stepped through the doorway and looked around. The room inside was incredible, even more ornate than the bathing room with the giant bathtub had been. It was a huge room, with curtained alcoves set every ten feet or so along the two side walls. The back wall of the room had several mirrors and small tables full of cosmetics and perfumes. There was also a small bookshelf full of worn, paperback novels. Mostly with black, pink, or red spines.

"You have books here?" She asked Betty 5. She thought that the Maestro did not approve of women reading books.

"Oh, yes." Betty 5 giggled. "Old romance books. They used to print a lot of them before the War, you know. Most of us can't read, but a few of us can, so they read to the rest of us. I heard you can read, so maybe you can do that. There's a lot of interesting ideas in there, about how to please the Maestro. That's important, to please him. You don't want him angry with you, do you?"

Aster said nothing. She most certainly did not want the Maestro angry with her, but she would be damned if she was going to go out of her way to read what sounded like books about a brothel (which to the pre-pubescent Aster was not a particularly interesting subject) in order to 'please the Maestro'. Hell, she didn't even want to be here. If she were going to read a book, Doctor Llewellyn's medical texts seemed a lot more interesting. She had read a few of them back up in his hospital. At least, she thought she had. If only she could remember what she had read.

The center of the room was well lit by a skylight overhear, had several large couches, dozens of lush potted plants, and a pool of clear water with a fountain in the center of it. Despite the haziness in her head, Aster gazed at it in amazement, her eyes wide in spite of her misery. It was like pictures of tropical islands and jungles she had seen in old pre-War books. The room was like her idea of heaven.

She looked down at the cast on her arm.

_No, not heaven._

She looked over at one of the other women in the room, who was walking with the mincing gait she remembered from a few years back, when she and her family had been forced to visit the Hall of Fallen Heroes after the Maestro's defeat of the Hulk.

_Bait._

Aster really couldn't imagine who would be stupid enough to fall for such bait. Animals fell for bait all the time, but animals had small brains.

She went over to one side of the room, between two of the curtained alcoves where the beds were, and drew aside a curtain that covered one of the windows. As she suspected, the outside of the window was barred. She could see straight down, nearly 100 feet to the ground. She went to another window, on a different wall, and saw the same sheer drop. Apparently this entire room, where the women stayed, was in one of the many large towers that she had sometimes seen when looking at the Maestro's palace from the outside. The only ways out were either past the armed guard, or through thick bars and then 100 feet straight down.

She looked again at the luxurious furnishings and sparkling fountain. Perhaps the other women didn't understand them as she did, because they didn't hunt. A lot of women thought the process of killing and gutting animals to be intolerably gruesome, but growing up in a zoo as she had, Aster had not been given the luxury of much squeamishness. Except, of course, nothing in the zoo had remotely prepared her for being raped by such a brute as the Maestro.

_Bait. _She thought again. _This is not a tower, it is a trap._

Bad. Very bad. Animals in traps might or might not be released alive, depending on the intentions of the trapper. And Aster did not trust the intentions of the Maestro one bit. He had no reason that she could see, to let her ever leave this place alive.

Betty 5 had caught up to her. "You're dressed all wrong. Let me show you where you can stay, and I'll get you some proper clothing." She pulled at Aster's hospital gown, then led her over to one of the alcoves. It was obviously unused, the bed made in an overly neat fashion, and the small dresser and shelf near it both empty.

"How tall are you?" Betty 5 looked Aster over. "About 5 feet? I'll get the smallest sized clothing for you."

Betty 5 dashed off to a small door on one side of the room that Aster hadn't noticed before, and she caught a glimpse of stacks of sheets, blankets, clothing, bottles, and other sundries. Then Betty 5 dashed back and threw a pile of sheer, green silk dresses on Aster's bed. Some of them were like belted tunics, others were like a long narrow poncho with no sides, that either tied or belted at the waist. All of them were so transparent that they would conceal absolutely nothing.

_I'd rather go naked, like one of the zoo animals._ Aster thought. _If I'm going to be putting my body on display in front of the Maestro and everyone else here, at least that would be honest. And maybe it would be more modest. Animals aren't ashamed of their own bodies. God, I hate it here._

But going naked, while the rest of the women wore these green silk dresses (or occasionally other colors if the Maestro was in the mood) would be drawing attention to herself. And that was how she had gotten herself into this place in the first place. Aster set her stuffed tiger, bottle of codeine, and exercise instructions down on the bed, picked through the dresses and finally chose one of them that was like a short tunic. At least the fabric of it wouldn't get in the way, like that of the longer dresses.

"I think I kind of like this style." She forced herself to smile at Betty 5. "Are there more, like it?"

"Oh, there's always plenty of dresses!" the older woman clasped her hands in a pleased manner. "You can go to the supply closet yourself any time you like, and pick out anything you need."

Aster looked at the shoes. There were three pairs, a sort of green sandal with spiked heels so high it seemed almost impossible to walk on, another pair of green sandals with a wide heel only about half an inch high, and some thin green slippers. It was becoming obvious that the green skinned Maestro had some sort of obsession with that color. None of the shoes, though, looked to be the sort to be running very fast in. She'd probably get farther, faster, in her bare feet. Unless she somehow managed to steal a pair of boots that the guards wore. Except that they probably didn't make them small enough to fit her.

The sandals with the short heels looked more durable than the slippers and more comfortable than the ones with the spiked heels.

"I guess I'll change into these." She said to Betty 5. "Do you mind stepping outside the curtain for a moment?"

"Certainly." Said the older woman in a bright voice.

_Certainly_. Aster thought after her in a sarcastic tone, making a face as soon as the curtain closed. She hated this room and the sparkling fountain. She wished she were back home, looking for snails or minnows in the muddy brown pond at the zoo.

It took only a minute for Aster to get out of her hospital gown and change into the green clothing that the Maestro required all his women to wear. She was about to hand the hospital gown to Betty 5, then thought better of it. It could be that the garment, or the fabric in it, might be useful in some way, in the future. She didn't know how, but she had always had a pack-rat mentality, and liked to collect odds and ends, some of which had proven useful in surprising ways, long after she originally acquired them. And she didn't like to waste things, such as matches, if she didn't have to. She remembered when she first started lighting the lantern in her and Thumb's room with a coal from the kitchen stove, rather than matches. That had been a long time ago.

She kicked the hospital gown under her bed, far enough that it couldn't be seen, and pulled the curtain back. "Well, what do you think?" She said to Betty 5.

"Well, you aren't wearing a bra, but you don't need one yet. Perhaps in a year or two." There had been bras in the pile of garments she had been given, green and transparent like the rest of the clothing, but the cups were ridiculously large for Aster.

"What should I do now?" Aster asked.

"Oh, not much." Betty 5 waved her hand vaguely. "Most of the time, the Maestro wants us to serve meals, and entertain him after dinner. But we already had lunch today, and dinner isn't for another few hours. You can look around here, or sit by the fountain, or read any of the books. Or go anywhere in the palace you like. There's all sorts of wonderful things to see here. Just make sure that you don't try to run away, and are always around for meals, especially dinner, or the Maestro will get angry, and you don't want that."

Aster frowned. It seemed like there had been something important in what Betty 5 had just said. If she hadn't been on codeine, she would have known immediately what it was. But she couldn't fix her mind on it. It was like trying to stab a raisin with a damp piece of paper, when you were accustomed to being able to use a fine, steel needle.

_Is this the way other people think all the time?_ She wondered. _The muzzy way the codeine makes me think? God, how can they stand it?_

The thought was one of several Aster had had in the past few years. When she had been younger, she had assumed that everyone thought exactly the same way she did, and when they sometimes failed, after being shown dozens times, to grasp things that she understood easily within a few minutes, she assumed that they were being deliberately obtuse, in order to annoy her and waste her time. It was part of what often made her rude to people. Eventually, she had come to understand that the obtuseness was not purposeful. That other people really WERE functioning that far below her. But it still annoyed her, and before having her own mental capacity drastically reduced by the codeine, she had never really understood what it must be like.

Aster wandered around the room for a while, and eventually sat on the couch, near the potted plants. She didn't like them, they looked artificial, standing there by themselves, with no real dirt on the ground, just in the pots, and no birds or insects. Probably not even any worms in the dirt. This place was too squeaky-clean for something like worms. It was a chosen slice cut out of a large ecological pie, and put here, and artificially maintained. But then, maybe that's what all the large animals at the zoo had been, too.

After a while she got bored with the plants. She pulled a leaf off one, tossed it in the fountain, and watched it float for a while. Then that got boring, too. Having nothing else to do, she took one of the romance books and began reading it. She supposed it was alright, though the situation of the characters in it, who led fantastically easy lives in the time before the War didn't seem to have that much to do with the way things were today. Betty 5 had mentioned that the books had a lot of ideas on how to please the Maestro, and the one Aster was reading did seem pretty explicit regarding how the two main characters ended up having sex. Several times. Though to her, it was basically a set of instructions, pretty much the equivalent of how to collect sperm from a male animal in fifteen different ways, each taking about fifteen times longer than it really needed to, and generally making a complicated fuss both before and afterwards, and a hell of a mess in the process. And neither of the main characters was a ten foot tall monstrously strong brute.

"Pfft!" Aster snorted and tossed the book to one side of the couch. She wished she had her old fairy tale books, those were more interesting.

She dozed off for a bit, and the next thing she knew, one of the Bettys, not Betty 5, though, was shaking her. "Come. Get up. We have to serve dinner."

Aster was awake instantly. She wasn't quite sure how she would serve dinner with a broken arm, but she didn't want to get into trouble by refusing. One of her flat heeled sandals had come partly off while she slept, and she pulled it back on and rebuckled it. Then she followed the other women down the hallway. They went into a door that led to a large kitchen, and each of them took a pot, or a bowl, or a platter containing some sort of food. Aster was about to ask how she would carry and serve food, with a cast on her arm, when one of the chefs in the kitchen gave her a large silver pitcher set with green gems.

"There's wine, in there." Said the chef brusquely. "You should be able to carry and pour that with just one hand, if you're careful about it. Fill each goblet halfway… the Maestro has a larger goblet, be sure and ask him how full he wants it."

Aster nodded. If the Maestro wanted the entire pitcher, and a whole barrel besides, she would give him whatever the hell he wanted. "Do I serve people in a certain order?"

The chef nodded. At least this one had a brain. He had actually run into one of the Maestro's women about a year ago who had stupidly tried to serve wine to the Wardogs. The Maestro had entertained himself that evening by watching three of the dogs mount the woman, before taking her himself.

"You serve the Maestro first. Then go to his right and go clockwise around each table, proceeding to the right, until you get around the entire room. If the Maestro wants you to alter the order, he'll let you know."

Aster nodded. The codeine was wearing off, making her mind clearer, but her bones ached. Never mind, hopefully she would be able to sit down after the dinner was over. Hopefully the Maestro wouldn't want to rape her again. Not so soon, when her bones were still broken from the last time.

Hopefully.

Partially resting the pitcher on her cast, Aster went back out into the dining room. She kept her eyes on the ground, not wanting to see the people there. The people who had been there the night she had been raped. Probably they were all there to laugh at her and hope she got raped again.

The pitcher was heavy, especially lifting it with only her right arm and having to rest it on the plaster cast that was on her left arm. She went up to the Maestro and curtsied slightly, hoping that was the proper thing to do. Having to hold the wine pitcher with only one good arm made bowing or kneeling impossible.

"How much wine do you want, your… my Lord?" she asked in a tremulous voice.

The Maestro turned towards her and looked her up and down. "Ah… the little zookeeper. All better, I see." He said, as if she didn't have a cast on her arm and bruises on her body.

Aster said nothing and waited. Finally the Maestro spoke again. "Fill the goblet completely full."

"Yes, my Lord." Aster carefully balanced the pitcher against her cast as she poured, struggling not to spill any. Finally the goblet was full, and she was about to turn to leave, when the Maestro seized her head between two fingers and turned her head to look directly at him.

"Little zookeeper." He growled. "What's your name?"

Aster inhaled, her eyes wide with panic. She felt a warm trickle down her legs. Her name was Aster Aversa. But she couldn't say that.

"Betty." She said. "Betty 23."

"Good.' To Aster's relief, the two huge fingers released her. "Make sure you remember that."

Aster nodded violently. The Maestro regarded her for a moment, then noticed the wetness on Aster's legs and dress and smirked. "Go serve the rest of your wine."

Her lips trembled and tears formed in her eyes, but she didn't say anything. She knew everyone could see where she had wetted herself, on the skirt of her dress, and wanted to run and hide, or at least change into clean clothing, but couldn't. She had to do her job. Just like at the zoo. But the jobs there, though often unpleasant and embarrassing, had never been as embarrassing as _this. _And at least there had been a point to them, beyond simply humiliating her.

But she had no choice. Not if she didn't want to attract attention to herself.

Trying not to think about the wet stain on her dress, she went to each table, proceeding clockwise as she had been told to by the chef. Probably the seating arrangement was related to whatever status each person had in the Maestro's court. She tried not to look at any of the people, most of them she didn't even know, anyways. And she didn't like the way most of them leered at her. If she didn't look at them, then she didn't have to see that. There were other women ahead of her, and behind her, serving different entrees to the diners, and she kept her eye on them, making sure that she didn't fall too far behind the woman in front of her. However, she couldn't help but recognize the filthy braid and scarred face of Daniel Wolfkiller, sitting at one of the last tables she served. He was occupied with trying to cut what looked like an overcooked piece of steak when she came to his table.

Aster went to one side of him and poured wine into his goblet. The man didn't pay any attention for a few seconds, then noticed the cast on her arm, and looked up. There was recognition in his eyes for a moment. Then he turned back to his steak, sawing at it furiously.

_He's probably laughing inside._ Aster thought, feeling sorry for herself. _He's probably glad about whats happened to me and thinks it serves me right for sneaking into his shed and poking around and stealing his crummy old bottle. He's a big pig, just like the Maestro, with all those prostitutes he kept bringing to the Zoo._

But she didn't want to think about the zoo, either. That made her even sadder.

Some of the diners eventually finished their wine, and one of the other women, whose name was Betty 11, whispered to Aster that she was to make sure that whenever she saw an empty wine goblet, she was to go and ask the diner if they wanted it refilled. Her ankle and hips began to ache a little after several trips around the room, but she didn't dare to stop. Stopping would get her punished, she was sure. As some of the diners got drunk, they began to pinch Aster's breasts, what there was of them, and her buttocks. She bit her lip and ignored it. She went by Wolfkiller once, when his goblet was empty, but when he saw her, he turned the goblet upside-down.

"No more wine." He said. Then he turned away, and began arguing with the man sitting next to him about someone he suspected of cheating at cards. Aster didn't know much about card games, so didn't really understand the matter, and continued on to the next man who wanted wine.

Eventually, most of the diners left, and Aster was able to slow down, and occasionally take the weight off her painful ankle and hips by leaning against the wall. She kept glancing at the Maestro out of the side of her eyes, afraid to look directly at him, worried that he would want to rape her again, but to her immense relief, the monster eventually got up, farted, then lumbered off somewhere by himself. The rest of the people in the dining hall seemed to be done as well. Aster wasn't sure what to do, then saw the other women clearing up the plates and other dinnerware, and putting them on metal carts. Aster didn't have a metal cart, so she walked next to a woman (Betty something or the other, Aster was sure) who did, and helped clear off the table as best as she could with only one arm.

Eventually, the room was cleared, and the tables wiped. The other women (all Bettys) either gathered in small groups to talk, or wandered off. Maybe back to the room where they all stayed, Aster wasn't sure. The conversations the other women were having sounded rather stupid and boring to her, all about makeup and perfume and hair, or which guards were the best looking, so eventually Aster decided to go back to the room where her bed was. She was tired and wanted to rest her eyes and her aching joints that were still recovering from being sprained. Doctor Llewellyn's bottle of codeine came to mind. Maybe she'd have some of that, it would help her to sleep.

Her mind on escaping from her troubles by drug induced unconsciousness, Aster failed to notice a group of four guards standing in the middle of the hallway, and nearly bumped into them.

"Hey, watch where you're going!" One of them snapped, giving her an abrupt push. That brought her to the attention of the other three.

"Hey, I know her!" said the guard who, judging by the fact that he had more stars and ribbons on his uniform, was probably in charge. He had a face like a weasel, and his balding, light brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail tied at the nape of his neck."That's the little zookeeper, isn't it?"

"Really?" said the first guard.

"Yeah." The ranking guard, whose name tag said 'Paul Rasse' licked his lips. "The Maestro was talking about her to me at dinner, after she poured his wine. Said he had gotten all the good out of her, so anytime I wanted to have fun with her, I could."

"Is that so!" Another guard chimed in, appearing amazed by such luck, as if a chest full of gold coins had suddenly dropped in front of him. "He doesn't share very often!"

Before Aster could collect her wits enough to run away, though a girl as small as her wearing flimsy sandals could hardly outrun four grown men wearing boots, Paul Rasse seized her by her cast, twisting her broken arm painfully.

"You come with us!" He told Aster. "And you better not bite or kick or scream."

She suddenly realized what was happening. "No!" Aster cried, against the instructions she had been given not to scream.

Rasse hit her in the face, splitting her lip open. The taste of her own blood poured into her mouth.

"Shut up!" He told her again. He pulled Aster by her broken arm into a small room, full of unmarked boxes of something or the other. Judging by the dust and spiderwebs, the room wasn't used very other guards followed behind and slammed the door shut behind them. Emboldened by their leader, Rasse, one of them seized Aster's flimsy dress and ripped it off her.

"Nice." Said the guard who held the remnants of her dress in his hand. He noticed the remains of wetness on it and held it up. "Look at this. The Maestro said she was so scared that she peed herself like a baby."

The other guards found that hilarious, and laughed in snorting voices.

"Keep it for a souvenir." One of them suggested.

The guard wadded it up and put it on top of one of the stacks of boxes, obviously intending to do just that.

The head guard, Paul Rasse looked Aster up and down. Nice. Not a hair on her body, just like the Maestro had said.

"Get on your hands and knees." He ordered her. Aster didn't understand the purpose of that, and stood there in confusion. Furious at being defied, Rasse took her roughly by the shoulders, spun her around, and threw her violently to the ground, causing her to land on her broken arm. She screamed with agony, and Rasse kicked her in the stomach, silencing her by knocking the air out of her.

"Hold her down!" Rasse told one of the other guards. "Stuff something in her mouth so she can't scream."

'Something' turned out, for lack of anything else convenient, to be the remains of the dress that had been torn off Aster. The guard who had put it on top of a crate, intending it for a souvenir, wadded up one section of it and forcibly stuffed it inside her mouth. It turned out to be the lower part, that she had peed on, earlier, and the smell of stale ammonia nearly made her throw up.

Rasse unbuttoned the fly of his pants and covered Aster with his body. She strained away from him and felt horrible pain. There was something strange about it… what the hell was he doing? He was raping her.. not where the Maestro had, though. Up her butt.

She nearly vomited again. Then the abnormal pressure of Rasse forcing himself up there made her lose control of her bladder and sphincter at the same time, and the smell of waste filled the room. This infuriated the head guard, who slammed her on the back of the head with one fist, making her bite her own lips. Blood, again, filled her mouth.

It didn't take Rasse long to finish. With disdain, he picked up one of the lumps of feces, and smeared it into her hair.

"Filth for the filthy zookeeper." He sneered.

Then the other guards had her. Not anally, but it still hurt. Not as badly as when it had been the Maestro, but still badly enough that she cried, and tried to scream despite the gag. Dimly, Aster remembered Doctor Llewellyn telling her that the Maestro had ripped her up inside, and that she was going to find sex painful from now on. And the damage the Maestro had done hadn't even healed yet, Aster had still felt scabs up inside herself only a few days ago, when she had reached a cautious finger up there to see how bad it still was.

After what seemed like nearly an hour of pain and humiliation, including Paul Rasse taking her again, the usual way this time, it was finally over. Rasse gave her a final kick in one of her legs, and with a jerk, yanked the dress she was gagged with out of her mouth. He sniffed it, then through it on top of her, despite the earlier talk of keeping it as a souvenir.

The guards left, laughing and slapping eachother's hands, and the door slammed behind them. But Aster didn't get up immediately. She lay there crying for about 15 minutes, not having the physical or mental resources to even move. Then she was afraid to move. What if they came back? What if they were playing a trick on her, and hiding right outside the door, and were going to start up again, as soon as she opened the door?

Eventually, she crawled over to the door, getting her own wastes smeared on her hands and knees in the process, but not really caring. She tilted her head and put her ear to the door, listening. She didn't hear anything. She reached up with her right arm and used the doorknob to pull herself to tottering feet. The filthy, torn dress was still draped over her. Aster tried to put it back on, but couldn't get the ripped garment to cover herself properly. Finally she gave up and just wrapped it around her waist like a towel.

Still worried that the guards might be hiding in silence, right outside the door, Aster lay down on the filthy floor and tried peering through the tiny crack between the bottom of the door, and the floor. She couldn't make out much, just some green tiles. Would there be shadows if anyone was standing there? She couldn't remember where any of the lights were.

Standing up again, Aster turned the doorknob as slowly and quietly as she could manage. She pulled it open a bare crack, not sure exactly what she would do if the guards were still there. At only 5' of height and barely over 100 lbs, she was hardly strong enough to hold the door closed against just one of the grown men trying to force it open, let alone all four.

She brought one eye to the crack and squinted out. She saw nothing.

Opening the door slightly wider, Aster tried to see as far in both directions as she could. Still nothing.

Finally, she dared open the door wide enough to poke her face out.

The hallway was empty, save for the lights along the ceiling.

Aster slipped out the door and into the hallway, listening as hard as she could for any sound of the guards who had raped her, or other guards who might do the same, coming towards her. The dress she had wound around her waist slipped slightly, and she struggled to refasten it with one good hand, while pinning part of it to her waist with her awkward plaster cast. Finally she managed to tuck it around herself fairly tightly, and covered her breasts with her cast. Crouching down slightly, she stayed barely a few inches away from the wall as she moved, like a frightened animal in a strange house. She wasn't sure anymore if she even remembered the way back to the room where all the women stayed and her bed was, but she sure as hell wasn't going to ask anybody.

Once, she heard footsteps at an intersection between two hallways, and pressed herself behind a pillar. Fortunately, whoever it was continued on their way, and didn't turn into the hallway she was in. Aster kept moving, low to the ground, and although she made a few wrong turns, eventually found her way back to the women's chambers. The guard with the rifle was there, and seemed surprised by Aster's appearance.

"What happened to you?" He said.

"What happened to you, what happened to you?" Aster imitated his voice in a sarcastic falsetto, not caring if it annoyed the guard into further abusing her. "Fuck you, and leave me alone."

The guard seemed about to say something, then shrugged. The women who lived inside the chamber often came back in various states of nudity or injury, or both. Rape and beatings were both often the entertainment of the day in the Maestro's castle, and if the women were lucky, they would suffer either or both at the hands of ordinary men, rather than the Maestro. By the look of this one, she'd been 'lucky' that way. At least this time.

Still… was that shit in her hair? Rasse's work, the guard guessed. It was well known that the tastes of the man ran towards buggery, and not always of women, either.

It wasn't his place to comment on the state of such women, or do anything about it, unless they were so obviously badly injured that they required the attentions of Doctor Llewellyn. Since this girl was still able to walk, and wasn't bleeding any longer from the cut on her lip, she didn't fall into the latter category. He shrugged, and stood back at attention, outside the door. He didn't need a beating himself, for being negligent at duty.

As Aster stumbled into the women's room, one of the Bettys ran up to her.

"What happened to you? I was wondering where you were, you didn't come back after the feast. Are you alright?"

Aster didn't want the attention of simpering women who suggested that she learn how to 'please the Maestro' any more than she wanted any sort of attention from the guard outside the door.

"Get the hell away from me!" She snarled, baring her teeth in her tiger-face.

The Betty hesitated. The girl was very small, true, but seemed rather crazed. And that big plaster cast on her arm would probably make a handy club. It wouldn't do to get bashed with it. Obviously the girl had been raped by some guards. An old story. But if they had done it, they had had permission from the Maestro to do it. None of the guards were stupid enough to take a woman _without_ the Maestro's say-so. At least, not twice. So if the girl had somehow displeased the Maestro tonight, perhaps by accidentally spilling wine from the pitcher, and this was the result, it wasn't her place to question it.

For her part, Aster pushed past the woman and looked around the room. There had to be bathtubs here, somewhere. The other women were too clean for there not to be. She began opening the doors that were along the front wall of the room. Sure enough, one of them was a bathroom, with several toilets, and a shower stall with several faucets along one wall, and small alcoves containing bars of soap, assorted bottles of substances that Aster didn't recognize, towels and rags, sponges and brushes.

Aster unwound the remains of the green dress from her waist and threw it into a corner. Let someone else pick it up, if they didn't like the mess. She turned on the faucet, as hot as she could stand, and stood in the stream, her left arm out to one side to keep the plaster cast from getting wet. She bent her head down, letting the water run through her hair for several minutes to wash out the feces that the horrible guard, Paul Rasse, had smeared into it. She took a bottle of shampoo with her right hand, unscrewed the cap with her teeth, and squeezed a large blob into her hair. Setting the bottle back down for the moment, she lathered it up one-handed, and let the water run through again. It took three repetitions before she felt that her hair was even slightly less dirty.

It was hard to shower with one hand, back in Doctor Llewellyn's office, the nurse had helped her, but she would be damned if she would ask any of the stupid Bettys for help. Aster managed. She soaped up one part of her body at a time, then scrubbed it with the brush. Then soaped it again, and scrubbed again. She wished she could scrub inside her vagina and anus as well, but putting a soapy finger up either channel hurt, and when she pulled it out again, her finger was covered with blood. She would have to let the inside parts of herself be, no matter how filthy they felt. If she hadn't been hobbled by injuries and her plaster cast, she would have tried turning herself onto her back, and letting the water from the shower clean her crotch while she was upside-down, but as it was, there was no way she could manage that at the moment.

Eventually, she felt clean. Or at least no more dirty than she had after a day of shoveling animal manure at the zoo. She took a large towel, white thankfully, rather than green, and wrapped it around her waist. She didn't bother to dry. Instead she just stumbled out of the bathroom and made her way over to her bed. Most of the other Bettys were already asleep (or at least in their beds) and the few who were awake didn't seem to want to talk to her. Or perhaps they didn't know what to say.

Aster went over to her bed, squeezed through the curtains, and threw herself down on the mattress. Finally, she was able to freely cry. She hated this place, and everyone in it. She wanted to kill all of them, from the Maestro and Paul Rasse, down to dirty-haired Daniel Wolfkiller, and probably even the stupid, simpering Bettys whose main ambition seemed to be finding a way to 'please the Maestro'. Nyah, nyah, nyah.

Reaching over, Aster took the bottle of codeine that Doctor Llewellyn had given her, and poured herself a brimming capful. She didn't want to be awake in this horrible place right now. The codeine would help her sleep, and maybe give her good dreams. That was a good idea. She poured another half a capful and swallowed it, as well. She lay back a few minutes, and pretty soon a pleasant, muzzy feeling came over her. The pain of her bruises and in her mind faded.

Aster got up to open the covers and saw that her stuffed tiger, Tony, was still on her bed, near the pillows. Aster sniffed. She got under the covers and held the toy in a tight embrace. She wished Tony were a real Tiger, like the ones she and her father had given to the Maestro, and she could train him to protect her. She bet a tiger could take on all of the Maestro's stupid old machine brained WarDogs. Tigers were fast and smart, and had real brains.

Thinking about the tigers that she and her father had trained for the Maestro brought back the fact that the Maestro had killed one of them, and the other one was rotting alive in a miserable cage.

_Just like me._ She thought through the muzziness. _I hate this place. I wish I were a tiger instead of a person. If I were, I'd be big and strong, not little and weak, and have sharp teeth, and rip out their throats for them. Especially those creepy guards and Paul Rasse. Rip out his throat and watch him bleed. And kill everyone here who is stupid and mean to me._

_Kill Kill Kill_

Thinking pleasant, bloody thoughts, Aster went to sleep still holding a battered, ancient toy tiger in her arms.


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter 10. Abnormal Habits

It didn't take long, of course, for Aster to become addicted to codeine. All opium derivatives were highly addictive. It was easier to endure the horrors of life in the Maestro's palace, when you were drugged. The Maestro himself seemed to have no further interest in her, other than making her perform whatever degrading tasks he could think of, ranging from pouring his wine, to scrubbing the floor, to emptying his chamber pot. The latter answering in the negative the question Aster had once asked herself regarding whether or not anyone manufactured toilets large enough for the ten foot tall monster. In her drug induced haze, she no longer recalled asking herself that question. She was, however, eventually to remember.

She quickly ran out of the codeine that Doctor Llewellyn had given her, and returned to his hospital for a refill. And another. And several more. He always gave her more, without asking any questions. The 20th century War on Drugs had long since been burned away by Thermonuclear War.

Aster was raped, several more times. Generally by a particular group of guards whose unofficial leader was the sadistic Paul Rasse. It always hurt. After a while, she stopped minding. With her mind nearly constantly fogged by codeine, it didn't seem real, anymore. It was just one more unpleasant thing to endure, like having to feed and clean up after the animals at the zoo during bad weather.

The addiction of the once clever Aster to brain fogging narcotics did not go un-noticed by the Maestro's stable master, Daniel Wolfkiller. He had a very specific idea in mind as to how to get Aster to use that clever, brilliantly educated mind of hers to find some obscure weakness in the apparently invulnerable green monster. Or better yet, more than one.

Needing to have her in decent shape in order to do what he wanted her to do, the stable master waited a few months until the cast came off Aster's arm, and she stopped limping, then a few months more to make sure she had fully recovered. At least, as much as she was going to, as Doctor Llewellyn had told him that the poor girl had internal scarring that was probably never going to heal. Finally the day came when he was actually about to approach her, but changed his mind when he noticed her dull expression and slow reactions. Rather than say anything, he watched and listened to her at the next meal. She spoke very little, of course, but when she did, her vocabulary was several notches below what it had once been.

_Stoned on something._ He thought. Most of the women kept by the Maestro ended up drunk or stoned almost all the time. He really didn't care about the other women. Being partly oblivious to what was happening to them was a mercy for them. It was no doubt a mercy for Aster, as well, but he couldn't use the other women. He could use the girl.

Wolfkiller wasn't certain what Aster was on, or where she was getting it. Probably she kept it somewhere in whatever bed she used in the women's room, but the armed guard there did not let just anyone inside without the Maestro's express permission, and there were no duties that the stable master had that would give him any sort of plausible pretext for entering that room let alone searching through Aster's belongings. Possibly she was prostituting herself to get it, which would prove inconvenient, as he would then have to deal with whoever she had her arrangement with, and find a way to threaten or bribe him into breaking the arrangement without arousing his suspicions as to his real reasons why. Most likely he'd have to convey the impression that he wanted Aster to prostitute herself to _him_.

Still, there was one other possible source of whatever drugs Aster was taking, for Wolfkiller to investigate first. Wolfkiller went into the stables and closed a few of the windows that opened out of the paddocks. Then he threw half a bale of hay below one particular open window, and stuck a pitchfork in the ground below one particular closed window. It was a code. Wolfkiller took care to often have some windows open and some shut, in the stables, and to have hay, pitchforks, and other objects often strewn around. But the particular arrangement he had just made was a signal that he wanted to meet with the doctor. Doctor Llewellyn, in his turn, had a code with the stable master that involved reviewing patient notes during meals while wearing a particular tie and having his left shoe untied. The doctor would, of course, frequently do one or two of those things during meals, but to do all three in combination meant that he wanted to meet with Wolfkiller. The meeting place often changed as well. Last time it had been in a park. Now it was at a picnic table at a food vendor in Dystopia.

Later in the day, at the appointed time (which also frequently changed), Daniel Wolfkiller was eating a sandwich of indeterminate meat which was starting to go bad. He grimaced and forced himself to eat it anyways. About halfway through it, Doctor Llewellyn sat down near him, with a bowl of stew. The physician took several spoonfuls, and from the smell of it, Wolfkiller wished that he had ordered the stew rather than the sandwich.

"So…" said the doctor in a low voice after swallowing a spoonful of meat, carrots, and potatoes.

"The girl's on drugs." It wasn't necessary to specify who 'the girl' was. There was only one girl, other than his daughter, that Daniel Wolfkiller had any interest in. Besides which the rest of the females kept by the Maestro were, unlike Aster, at least physically mature, though some of them were nearly as young.

Doctor Llewellyn shrugged and took another bite of stew. "And?"

"Are you giving it to her? Or is she getting it from somewhere else?" _Somewhere_ _else _in this case of course actually meaning _someone else_, whom the stable master would then have to decide how best to deal with.

"I gave her a bottle of codeine. For the pain of her injuries while they healed." The doctor said in an even voice. "I let her refill it when she needs more."

"When she needs more…" Irritation showed in Wolfkiller's sour expression. "It's been months since that bastard nearly killed her. Months since you took the cast off her arm. She doesn't limp any more. I'm sure she's been raped since, but what he did to her has long since healed. She's a god damned junkie, and you know it."

"Yes, I know. Most of those poor women are. What of it?"

"Stop giving her the stuff!" Wolfkiller demanded.

"No." The doctor shook his head. "I won't."

"I need her!" Fury was evident on the younger man's face.

"You need to use her, you mean." corrected Doctor Llewellyn.

"Yes, if that's how you want to put it. But I need her sober, not stoned to the gills. You knew that. Why'd you keep refilling the bottle for her? You must know that she's healed by now."

"Because I'm a doctor." the older man snapped. "And it's a mercy. You don't even know for sure if you CAN use her. If she CAN find anything out. If there even IS anything to find out. But I DO know for sure that she's going through seven kinds of hell, and the drugs at least can dull the pain for her."

"God damn it. She's the only one in a position to get close enough to that monster to spot any sort of weakness, with the mind to recognize it when she sees it. But only if she's sober. You talk about mercy? What about all the other girls he's going to rape to death. What about my wife? Did you care about mercy for her, when you did what you did?"

Doctor Llewellyn looked at the ground. "That's not fair. I didn't have a choice, and you know it. If it hadn't been me, he'd have just killed me and found someone else to do it."

"And yet you keep doing it. Well, now you have a choice. Stop giving her the stuff."

"It's not that simple." The Doctor sighed. "Addiction is a complicated thing. You can't force an addict to stop, unless they _want _to stop. If I cut her off, and she still wants the stuff, how long before she finds another source?"

Wolfkiller bit into his sandwich, so miffed that he didn't even notice the taste of the tainted meat. He thought for a while. He had meant to use pride to get Aster to cooperate with him. The girl had that in spades, he knew that much. Or at least, she once had. Did she still have it? Could he use that to make her _want_ to stop numbing her pain, despite what she would suffer. Or if not pride, then perhaps hate. Because there was plenty of reason for her to feel that, as well.

"If I can get her off the stuff…" he said slowly. "Will you promise me not to try to get her back on it again?"

"If that bastard rapes her again," It wasn't necessary for him to specify _which _bastard. "I'm not going to leave her to suffer through that sort of pain without medication."

"Fine." Wolfkiller spread his hands. "Short of that, or her being badly injured elsewhere, will you promise me that if she stops taking the stuff, you won't try to push it back on her?"

Doctor Llewellyn thought about it. "If she's strong enough, and smart enough, to get herself clean, then she _might_ be strong and smart enough to do what you want her to do, despite what it will cost her. So yes, you have my word on that."

"Good." Wolfkiller stood up, leaving the rest of his sandwich. He was starting to feel queasy. Perhaps he shouldn't have eaten it.

"_Might _being the operative word, mind you." Doctor Llewellyn emphasized. "She still may not be able to find anything. Or there may be nothing to find."

"I'll take that chance. It's still better than nothing."

So it was that a few days later, Wolfkiller waited in the Maestro's dining hall after a meal, until Aster had finished helping clean up the tables, and wandered off down the hallway with a dazed look on her face. He took several calculated seconds to finish eating one more bite of fried fish, then set on off down the hallway.

He caught up to Aster around two corners of the green tiled hallways. She was walking with one hand trailing along the wall.

_Probably has a hard time balancing when she's stoned. _Thought the man. It was something he had often seen before. He wasn't certain whether she was sober enough to remember what he was going to say to her. If not, he could always remind her of it later.

_Best to get this over with._ He didn't particularly relish the cruel thing he was now going to have to do, or what Aster would suffer if it worked. But it was a _necessary_ thing. If there were any other way to find out if the Maestro had any weaknesses, he would have done it.

Wolfkiller went up to Aster, and blocked her progress by putting one arm in front of her.

"Hello, Betty." He said in a mocking tone.

Aster looked up at him, dully. That was her name now. Betty, Betty 23. The Maestro said so, and that was what everyone called her. Then she recognized Daniel Wolfkiller by his scarred face and dirty hair, and scowled slightly. Wolfkiller was pleased by the scowl. There was _still _someone at home in there.

But he didn't let the pleasure show. Instead he said with a sneer, "That is your name, now, isn't it? Betty 23. Not Aster Aversa any more, is it?"

"What do you want?" Tears formed in Aster's eyes. "To fuck me, like everyone else, here? You were always a dirty pig, even back at the zoo."

"Hmm. Betty it is." Wolfkiller forced himself to look smug. "Probably I'll take you up on that offer. In a few years, when you have some tits. Like I told you before, I like women, not little girls."

"Whyncha leave me alone." Aster slurred. "You got whatcha wanted, got me here, just for stealin' your crummy old bottle."

"Yes, that IS what I wanted." The man agreed. Aster tried to push past his arm, but he shoved her lightly back. "You always thought you were so smart. Well, now you see who's smart. The Maestro. Not you. You're nothing but a little stoned slut, just like all the rest of the Bettys here."

"I was smart…once." Aster started crying. "I was a real person, once. A long time ago."

_A real person?_ Wolfkiller wasn't sure what that meant. Doctor Llewellyn could have explained to him that one of the worse results from repeated abuse was depersonalization, but the physician wasn't around for the stable master to ask, and he had to think on his feet, so he disregarded the comment, and forgot about it. Though he was later to remember it again.

"Well, you're not smart, now." Wolfkiller sneered. "You're going to be here forever, you know that? The Maestro will never let you go. What do you think you're going to do, fight him? The Hulk couldn't fight him, nobody in the Hall of Fallen Heroes could fight him. They tried, and they're all dead."

A distant memory from years ago occurred to Aster, but before she could fix on it, Wolfkiller went on. "Nobody can fight the Maestro. He's the strongest one there is. He hasn't got any weaknesses. Not one. You think you're so smart? Just try and see if you can find even one tiny weakness in him. Because you won't, there aren't any. Not one. And once you realize that, you'll realize just how stupid a little girl you are for trying to show off that you were smart, and ending up here. Then maybe you'll do me a favor and overdose on whatever junk you're taking, so I won't have to put up with you poking your stupid little smart girl nose into my private business ever again."

Despite the drugs in her system, Wolfkiller's obscene and mocking words finally penetrated through to what was left of Aster's emotions, and fury made her face turn red and her teeth grit. _Good, _thought Wolfkiller. _Something _was getting through to her.

"Enjoy yourself the next time you run into Rasse and his friends." He said with a final sneer, as he pulled back his arm, so Aster could leave. "If you're nice to them, maybe they'll give you some junk, if Doctor Llewellyn ever decides to cut you off."

With that, Daniel Wolfkiller turned and sauntered on down the hallway. Aster stood there for a moment, watching him furiously.

_I hate him. I hate them all. Want to kill them._

The thought of killing brought back memories of holding her stuffed toy, Tony Tiger, the night after she had been raped by Paul Rasse and his nasty friends. Probably Wolfkiller was one of his friends, too, even though she had never seen them together. They probably met together in secret and all laughed at her.

Wolfkiller's combination of disparagement and implied threats made Aster feel nearly as dirty as when Paul Rasse and his friends would rape her. Worse, in a way, because the group of guards generally merely insulted her body, or supposed sexual morals. They had never insulted her _mind_ and called her _stupid_ the way the stable master had just now.

She made her way back to the women's quarters, absentmindedly checking in with the guard currently on duty as 'Betty 23' before going to the bathroom. After stripping off the usual sheer green dress she was wearing, Aster stood in the shower underneath a stream of water so hot she could barely stand it for a long while. After a long time, her skin began to get wrinkled, so she turned the water off, and just sat down, leaning against the green tiled wall. She dozed off for a few hours, easy despite being on a hard floor, because of the codeine in her system Then she got up again, her mouth dry.

Aster went to one of the row of sinks, took a cup from a shelf above it, and poured herself a large glass of water. Then another. That made her bladder start working, so she used the toilet. When she came back out, there was another one of the Bettys in the bathroom.

"You're up early." said the Betty, who Aster recognized as Betty 19. "It's barely dawn."

"I think I'm sick." Aster did her best to look slightly nauseated. "I snitched a few meat scraps from the kitchen last night - you won't tell, will you? But I think they were going bad. I don't think I can help serve breakfast today, I might throw up. Will you tell everyone for me?"

"Of course." Betty 19 nodded. Stealing, and illness - either real or feigned - were both common among the Maestro's women. They always covered for each other regarding both, and the Maestro did not seem to care if 'illness' caused one of them to be occasionally absent from serving him. Provided it was only _occasionally_ and not too often.

"Good." Aster peered at herself in the mirror, and took another drink of water.

_Show him STUPID. _She thought sulkily in regards to the mean Daniel Wolfkiller. _I'll find some weakness of his precious lord Maestro. Maybe more than one. Then he'll see who's stupid, that I can find out something by myself in a few days that he and all his sick friends couldn't find together in years._

It occurred to her that she wasn't going to be able to find any weaknesses of the Maestro if her brain was in a codeine induced fog, reducing her mind to the level of that of other people. Or maybe even below that level, for all she knew. Why was she even taking it anyways? She thought for a long time, while the other Bettys began coming into the bathroom for their usual morning ritual of using the toilet, showers, sinks, and mirrors. But she couldn't remember why. With her brain on drugs, the question as to why was too hard.

Aster eventually gave up on trying to remember why she was taking the codeine and asked herself a slightly different question.

_Why am I __**supposed**__ to be taking the codeine. _Fact was easier than speculation. Slightly easier, at any rate. After a great deal of thought, Aster recalled that she was _supposed_ to be taking the narcotic solution in order to help numb the pain of her broken bones and other injuries.

_Ha._ She thought once she finally recalled the reason why she was _supposed_ to be taking the codeine. It was the first time she had been able to figure out anything mentally in months. But the answer led directly to another questions. If she was _supposed _to be taking the codeine to help with the pain of her injuries, then the obvious question was as to whether she did, in fact, still even have any pain from her injuries.

That was a hard question. She remembered that there had been horrible pain at first, inside her body between her legs, even worse than where her bones were broken. But that had been a long time ago, she hadn't thought about it much for months. Not since she started taking the codeine.

_Is there still pain?_ She was still naked, and looked at her own nude body in the long bathroom mirror, especially at her ribs and left arm, where the bones had been broken. A few of the Bettys that were alongside her, applying makeup, gave her an odd look, but ignored her when one of the other Bettys whispered something about "Betty 23 is sick."

Aster stared blearily at her body. The bruises were gone. She couldn't see them. Still looking at her own reflection, she poked her finger into her ribs, and her own arm muscles. Softly at first, then harder. But there was still no pain. All she felt was her own pointy finger. She actually poked here and there for a few hours, not noticing the time, or that the other Bettys had all left. Eventually she decided that there was no pain, no matter where she poked. Not even when she poked a finger inside herself, underneath. She rinsed her finger off, took another drink of water, and looked back in the mirror.

_So, if there isn't any pain anymore, if that's not why I'm taking the codeine, then why __**AM**__ I still taking it?_

It was the original question, the one she couldn't answer before, simply rephrased. But by this time, it had been over sixteen hours since she had last taken any codeine, before dinner the previous day. Time, rest, and the water she drank had flushed much of it out of her system. Not all of it, but a lot. Her mind was not back to it's peak performance, but it _was_ working at a level above average for most people.

She thought for a long time, occasionally still poking at her own arm or ribs in the mirror, as if expecting them to start hurting again. The time for lunch came and went. A few Bettys sometimes came in to use the bathroom. Finally she decided that the reason she was taking the codeine, was to help her forget about the horrible things that the Maestro and Paul Rasse and his friends were doing to her.

_Well, now we're getting somewhere!_ Came a sarcastic thought in her head, that reminded her of something the nasty stable master, Wolfkiller might say. _So you're taking the junk so you don't have to think about the big bad nasty Maestro and being split apart by his cock._

Another question, in the same sarcastic tone, came almost immediately.

_And do you think that __**that's**__ a good enough reason to be taking this stuff, and turning yourself into a little addicted junky?_

_**YES!**_Cried a little girl's voice in her. _I __**LIKE**__ the stuff. It gives me happy dreams, even when I'm awake. I close my eyes and I can dream that I'm back home at the zoo._

And there had been other dreams, as well, the past few months, that Aster would not admit to herself. Of being an older, grown up Aster, one who had never been snatched from her home by the horrible Maestro, and had become Zookeeper, and despite her ugly face, had gotten married to a man. A man who (of course) looked nothing at all like the giant, olive skinned, gray haired Maestro, but instead was a normal size, had pale skin, and dark, dark hair (emphatically not balding like the horrible Paul Rasse), and helped her run the Zoo while everyone cheered for her.

_**YES.**_ The little girl in her cried again. _It is a good reason. I hate being here. I __**WANT**__ the dreams._

But there was another voice, too. That of an older Aster. Or perhaps the pride that Wolfkiller had so astutely seen in her.

_No._

No matter how much she wanted and liked the dreams, how much she hated it here, it wasn't a good enough reason to be taking the codeine. To be shutting off her own brain.

Besides, how was she going to show Wolfkiller who was the real smart one, if she kept taking it? She would show him. Then he would be sorry.

It was, of course, an illogical chain of thought, since Aster wasn't very clear on just exactly _how_ Wolfkiller would be sorry, other than a vague, nonsensical idea, of somehow stealing several more bottles from him. As if the stable master had some special hidden room somewhere, filled with nothing but bottles. But it was a _useful _illogical thought.

Aster wrapped a towel around herself for modest and warmth, and went back out to her bed alcove. She took the bottle of codeine from her dresser, went to the bathroom, and poured it all down the sink.

_Fuck that shit, and fuck Wolfkiller and Rasse and everyone here._

She kept the bottle, not sure what she would do with it. But she liked bottles, and still had a vague idea in the back of her head of somehow stealing the imaginary bottle collection she had attributed to the stable master.

The rest of the day went by fairly well, and Aster helped to serve at supper. She felt decent, and fairly proud of herself at finally figuring things out. But, of course, it wasn't that easy. Addictions to anything did not simply go away without a price or a struggle. Aster was aware of that fact, of course, from the education her father had given her. But like all drug addicts, she somehow had managed to fool herself into thinking that the principle didn't apply to her. She had only been taking codeine for a few months, perhaps four or five, and it had as of yet had little effect on her body or mind. Nor was codeine as addictive as the more potent opium derivatives, such as morphine and heroin. The price she had to pay for not taking it was small. But small as it was, it still had to be paid.

The human body and mind is a remarkably adaptive thing. It is capable of achieving homeostasis, or what the body regards as the ideal state, despite all sorts of conditions trying to take the body away from homeostasis. Lower the temperature, and the body starts shivering to produce heat. Raise the temperature, and the body sweats to cool itself. Challenge it by lifting heavy weights, and the body responds by growing more muscle. Do something as drastic as removing an entire half of the brain, and the remaining half eventually takes over all the functions of the missing half. In Aster's case, she had been taking sedatives for months, and her body and mind had been attempting to compensate by producing more of the chemicals responsible for alertness and thought in the brain.

Though Aster had thrown the codeine down the sink early that afternoon, her body had no way of knowing that. It had become accustomed to the presence of the drug, and producing more of the chemicals that existed in the brain as a result. So far as her body was concerned, the presence of codeine had been the 'normal' state for some time, and there was no way for Aster to tell her body otherwise. The result was that, later that evening, rather than falling asleep, she became more and more awake. It was as if she had drunk several large cups of coffee.

_I want to sleep._ She thought. _I need the codeine to help me sleep!_

_No. No codeine. _She had made up her mind about that. Her mind was one advantage she had over most addicts. She was blessed and cursed with genius. Even when she had been on the codeine, her mind still functioned at levels that were close to what would be normal for most people. It was the only thing that allowed her the insight into her own addiction, when most other people in the same situation would have lacked the mental processing power to go through the train of thought that Aster had that morning. And it gave her the will not to go running to Doctor Llewellyn now, to ask him for more codeine.

Aster did not sleep that night. Or the night after. Despite not sleeping, she felt the way she had when she had once drunk a large cup of very black coffee at the market in Dystopia. So hyper she felt like running back and forth and jumping off the walls.

The third night, she still didn't sleep. However, despite having been awake for nearly 72 hours, she now felt _slightly_ less hyper than she had previously. There was a limit to how long people could stay awake, and Aster had nearly reached it. Besides which her body was beginning to adapt to the new state of no longer having codeine in the bloodstream.

She thought she could, perhaps, be able to sleep part of the night, if she worked off some energy. Maybe she should take a walk. She went over to the door, and addressed the guard.

"I'm starving. I didn't eat supper tonight." she said. "I'm going to the kitchen for a snack."

"Name?" It was the usual routine.

"Betty 23." Aster knew the correct answer by now. She had even begun to believe it, under the influence of the drugs.

"Good enough." The guard made a note on his clipboard. It wasn't unusual for any of the Bettys to want to leave at odd hours to eat, or get some air on a balcony. So long as they weren't trying to meet a lover, or escape, the Maestro didn't really care what they did or when they did it.

Aster was wearing her usual tunic shaped green dress and the flat sandals, that were better for walking than either the slippers or the sandals with the high heels, and kept up a fairly brisk pace. The exercise seemed to work, in reducing her hyper energy level, and she made a sort of a math game of counting the intersections and thinking about what numbers they were divisible by.

Then she heard voices. Male voices.

_Oh, hell. What if that's Rasse and his buddies?_

There were three main parties she hated in the Palace, one being the Maestro himself, the other being Daniel Wolfkiller, and the third being Rasse and his friends. The particular party she hated the most usually depended on which was nearest to her at the time. Right now, that would be Rasse and his friends. If it _was_ them. She wasn't sticking around to find out.

Quickly, she tried the nearest doors, not sure which of them, if any, would be open. Her insomniac wanderings had taken her to an unfamiliar part of the Maestro's palace, and she wasn't really sure where she was. Fortunately, the second door she tried was open, and she went in. It was a dark room, lit only by a red 'exit' sign above the door. She saw the shapes of shelves and stacks of crates in the ruddy light, and wrinkled her nose. The crates reminded her of the room where Paul Rasse and his sick friends had raped her the first time. Well, she didn't want a repeat of that. Worried that Rasse (or whoever it was that she had heard) might possibly come into the room, she scurried behind a row of crates near the back wall, and lay as quietly as she could, shivering from the cold of the floor and hoping that the owners of the voices would go away.

No such luck. The voices actually got closer, and then _stopped_ very near the door of the room where she was hiding. She couldn't make out, through the door, what the voices were saying, but did here the distinct metallic tinkle of bottle caps hitting the tiled floor. Apparently the guards were drinking on duty, and likely would not move on until they finished whatever alcoholic beverage they had. Beer, most likely.

Aster listened carefully for any hint of the guards entering the room she was in. It seemed likely, because there was a strong smell of stale urine. Possibly the guards drank beer outside this room fairly often, then got rid of the results by peeing behind the crates here. Or it could be just rats. She wasn't sure. She quivered. It reminded her of the night, so long ago, when she and Thumb had hidden in the basement, terrified, while the Maestro fought the Hulk, who was actually a younger version of himself. She had been scared of rats then. Or was it Thumb who had been scared? It had been a long time ago, and she couldn't really remember it clearly any more. And it had been a long time since she had thought of Thumb, or home, as well. Not since before she had started taking the codeine. Maybe that meant her head was getting back to normal.

Laying there and listening, Aster gradually became aware of _another _sound. Some sort of rapid, tapping, clicking noise. It would sometimes stop for a few moments, then continue on.

_What is that? Something one of the guards is doing? Tapping his foot? It doesn't sound like that._

She was wary of anything she didn't understand, here in the Maestro's castle. Anything unknown was probably bad (meaning that it would result in her being raped, or beaten, or both). She listened harder, struggling to understand what the strange noise was, before whatever it was somehow found her. Cocking her head from side to side, she eventually decided that the noise was not coming from the guards in the hallway, but rather, from a different direction, from a small vent set in the wall, barely two feet away from where she was laying. Now that she looked, and her eyes had adjusted to the dark, she saw that there was light coming through the vent, too. Whatever air duct was behind this room must have had vents opening into two rooms, back to back.

The odd noise continued. Tap, tappity tap.

_What is that?_ The combination of her own innate curiosity, and the practical need to know any possible source of new danger, made Aster slide, very very slowly towards the vent. It was actually a foot or so past where the crates were piled, so she had to stick her head out beyond the crates in order to look through the vent. Nervously, she turned to look at the door, but although she still heard the sounds of the guards drinking, there was no sign of any of them trying to enter.

Finally, she put one eye to the vent. It was a small grating of strong metalwork in the shapes of diamonds, about a foot long and 6 inches high. Not even a small child would be able to fit through it, into the ventilation system, but she could _see_ through it into the room behind this one.

What she saw didn't seem particularly interesting or alarming. It was an old man, maybe about Doctor Llewellyn's age, with straggly grey hair on a bald head, and a thick, grey beard. He was sitting at some sort of machine, that Aster recognized as a typewriter of some kind. She had seen and heard people using typewriters before, but they had always been manual typewriters, old even in pre-War times, and requiring a lot of force to use. This typewriter was _electric_, judging by the fact that the old man was barely touching the keys. The Maestro's castle, unlike other places in Dystopia, had plenty of electricity, but Aster had never really considered the consequences of that fact to something as mundane as typing, before. Though now it made sense, now that she saw it.

Or, perhaps, it didn't make sense. Now that she looked at it, there was something odd about the typewriter. It was just the letter keys, in a flat rectangle. There wasn't any paper. There was a sort of a glowing TV screen instead, set above the letter keys and about a foot away. Aster had seen old pre-War Tvs, but never a working one, and usually they had been partly cannibalized for the metal in them. This one was working, judging by the glow, and from the way the old man kept looking up at it, Aster guessed that whatever he was writing must somehow appear on the screen, rather than on paper like a regular typewriter.

_A computer._ She finally realized. She had seen pictures of them in old Pre-War books, and there were several non-working ones laying around at the Zoo. She had known, of course, that there were working _computers_ in the Maestro's palace, she had often heard the guards and the Bettys mentioning them, and describing some of the nearly miraculous things they could do, like having thousands of books in a tiny box, but she had never seen one before.

_Neat. _Aster looked around the room the old man was in, wondering what other interesting stuff was in it, but was disappointed. Just some dusty books and papers. And an overly large door, like all of them in the palace, built to accommodate the Maestro if he wanted to enter a room. Other than that, the only unusual thing about the door is that there were at least six deadbolt locks on it, all drawn shut.

_Paranoid much, old man?_ Aster had to suppress a giggle. Probably the old man, whoever he was, was afraid of someone stealing his _computer. _A fairly sensible fear, a working _computer _had to be pretty damn valuable.

But it was not the computer the old man was protecting.

Several minutes passed, and Aster grew rather bored watching a rather dull looking old man do apparently nothing but write his diary on a bit of pre-war technology. She was about to get back behind the crates, lest one of the guards in the hallway outside her room enter and spot her, when the old man turned off the _computer _and stood up. He was wearing nothing but an old bathrobe, which he unceremoniously stripped off, and lay on the back of the chair where he had sat.

_Great. An old pervert. As if this place weren't full enough of them._

Not really wanting to see what some wrinkly old perverted creep would do, wank off most likely, Aster was about to slide back behind the crates, when she caught a glimpse of odd motion under the old man's skin. It was as if a balloon were being inflated inside his arm.

_What the hell is that? _She had never heard of the human body being capable of somehow inflating itself. She gaped. The inflation spread, the old man growing larger, twice his size. Larger still. His skin began darkening and turning green. The old man gasped, in obvious pain from whatever was happening. He bent double, then straightened, his head nearly reaching the high ceiling of the room he was in.

_What __**WAS **__happening, anyways?_

The process was over within a few minutes. Where the old man had stood, or maybe he was _still _standing there, since he had never left, just somehow _changed _like a caterpillar into a butterfly, or a werewolf from some of the old fairy tales, stood someone else.

Someone Aster knew well.

Someone Aster hated with every atom of her being.

The Maestro.

_What the __**HELL**__! _Aster had to use every bit of her will to keep from crying out, or gasping in amazement and fear. If her body hadn't been clean of the codeine for the past three days, she wouldn't have been able to manage it.

Done with whatever the hell sort of physical process had turned him from a rather ordinary, wrinkly looking old man into the ten foot tall green monstrosity she was familiar with, the Maestro took the oversized purple trousers and metal breastplate he usually war from a high shelf, where Aster had not really noticed them, and put them on. Then he slid back the deadbolts from the metal door of the room, one at a time, stepped out, and closed the door behind him.

A moment later, the light in the room went out.

_What the bloody damned hell! _Aster struggled to understand what she just saw. Somehow the old man had become the Maestro. Or he had become the old man, she wasn't sure. Obviously, he _must_ have somehow turned himself into an old man, to use that _computer _thing, his real fingers would have been too big, and probably broken the keyboard the moment he touched it, as overly strong as he was. Then turned back when he was done.

Aster thought about it, so furious that she couldn't even mentally process the implications for over a minute. She had known, of course, as everyone in Dystopia did, that the Maestro had once been a man, and been turned into the huge green creature that he was, by being exposed to radiation of some sort from a bomb he had made. There had been other people like that, back before the war. And even now, the Abominable creature that stole from the farmers Outside was supposedly one. But she had assumed, like everyone did, that once he had been turned into a giant green monster, the Maestro had been stuck that way permanently. Now, it seemed, that was not the case.

_He can turn back?!_

_**He can turn back?!**_

_**HE CAN TURN BACK AND HE BLOODY WELL NEARLY SPLIT ME APART AND KILLED ME AND TORE ME UP INSIDE WITH THAT GIANT BLOODY **__**THING**__** OF HIS?!**_

Nearly blinded by her fury, Aster didn't even notice the pain when she bit through her own lip. The taste of her own blood, that had so often covered her body in the past months further infuriated her. Bloody hell, if only she had had a bow, or a gun, and had been able to shoot the bastard through the grating when he had been small and helpless.

The very thought that the Maestro was capable of turning himself back into a normal sized person was nearly intolerable to Aster. For a ten foot tall monster to want sex, and tear apart women in the process, because he was a perverted pig and wanted to get off, was, perhaps, slightly understandable, if not at all forgivable.

For the same ten foot tall monster to do some completely unnecessarily, when he could turn back to a normal size and at least commit rape without tearing his victims apart in the process, was absolutely beyond the pale.

Aster wasn't sure how long she lay there, quivering like a taut bow string in the worst fury she had ever felt in her life. She thought for a moment about going to Wolfkiller and proving how smart she was that she'd been able to find out that the Maestro was _sometimes _weak. That he could _sometimes _turn back into a regular person. Which implied, possibly, that maybe there was a way to MAKE him turn back. Nature could often be tricked. Her father had taught her that. The artificial insemination they often did on the animals at the zoo, had been described by her father as a dirty trick on nature, manipulating things to get the result they wanted.

But then she recalled all the locks on that door. She had thought at the time she saw them that the old man - the Maestro - had been paranoid. And so he was. But he wasn't protecting the _computer. _He was protecting _himself. _It was obvious from the locks that he did not want anyone to know - ever! - that he sometimes changed himself into a weak and vulnerable form.

Hell, she couldn't tell Wolfkiller what she had seen, to prove to him that she was smart. She couldn't tell anyone, ever. If the Maestro ever suspected that she knew, that she had seen what she had, he would kill her out of hand. And probably everyone he thought she might even possibly have told. Which, given his obvious insanity, would be half the palace, or half of Dystopia, for all she knew. Certainly it would include her father and sister.

No. She could never tell. She could never give anyone, especially the Maestro, a single _hint _that she knew. She could never even come back to this room, ever again.

But she knew one thing. Daniel Wolfkiller was wrong. The Maestro did have weaknesses. She had just seen what was probably the biggest one. But where one existed, there could be others. She was going to find out what every single one was.

Then she was going to find a way to use them.

Then she was going to kill him.


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter 11. Prosecution

Aster learned to avoid being noticed. She tried as much as possible to stay with the other women, whenever coming from or going to one of the Maestro's feast-like meals. Sometimes she would explore the palace by herself, but learned to keep alert for anyone approaching her, and wherever she was, she always kept in mind the three nearest hiding places. Whenever she did meet someone, she offered them whatever particular rituals of respects that the other women did, no more, no less. The bowing was meaningless to her, nothing more than something done to avoid trouble, like not trying to stare down one of the animals in the zoo. If the bows meant something to those she bowed to… well no doubt animals felt smug when she or her father avoided eye contact with them.

Occassionally, she considered exploring the palace at night, thinking that perhaps she would learn something as extraordinary as she had the one night she had gone wandering due to insomnia caused by her withdrawal from codeine. Learning that the Maestro could, at times, turn back into an ordinary human being, presumably as easily killed as anyone else, was beyond a doubt the most interesting thing she had learned in her short life. But where there was one interesting thing to learn, there might be others. And most likely WOULD be others, far more interesting. It was as if you were to kick a haystack, and have a diamond fall out at your feet. Chances were, the haystack was full of diamonds, and odds were against the particular diamond that first fell out being the largest of the lot.

But exploring the palace at night would draw attention to herself. The other women, the Bettys, all got up shortly before breakfast and went to bed shortly after dinner. They did not go wandering around at midnight or 3:00 am. And drawing attention was dangerous. Still, there were ways to use the night time hours WITHOUT drawing attention to herself. She had gotten off the codeine (though often after being raped by Paul Rasse and his sadistic gang of guards she was sorely tempted to take it again) but that did not mean that she could not give the _impression_ to others of still taking it. There were reasons for that, one being that if everyone thought she was perpetually stoned it would put them off their guard, the other being that it gave her an excuse to go periodically to Doctor Llewellyn's hospital.

Thus, every few weeks, Aster would go up the few stories in the palace to the level where Doctor Llewellyn's hospital was, carrying a small silk purse with her empty glass bottle inside, along with the sorts of cosmetics the other Bettys liked to have with them, and ask him to refill it. Occassionally his nurse would raise an eyebrow, but never offered a comment. As soon as Doctor Llewellyn (or his nurse if he wasn't there) went in the back with the bottle to get the codeine, Aster would quickly scan the large bookshelf in the front room where Doctor Llewellyn kept his medical texts. She would seize one that looked interesting, put it in her silk purse, and rearrange the other books to conceal the gap. The next time she came back, a few weeks later, on the pretext of obtaining more codeine, she would return the book, and get another.

Unbeknownst to Aster, Doctor Llewellyn was well aware of her 'borrowing' of his medical texts. He said nothing to her about the matter. Apparently Wolfkiller had someone persuaded her to stop taking codeine, and her 'refills' were merely a pretense to allow her access to his books, without raising suspicion. Well, he wasn't going to TELL her she could read his books whenever she wanted. It would make her careless. Of course, there was always the possibility that she was somehow trading or selling the codeine to someone else, but that was hardly his concern.

Probably it _would_ have been more clever of Aster to get goods or favors in return for the narcotics she wasn't using herself, but the idea of doing so didn't even occur to her. Being on the autistic side of the human psychological spectrum, there were a great many things she saw that others did not, but the opposite was also true. There were things that others could easily see and think, such as the possibility of selling or trading drugs, which Aster had a large blind spot regarding. Especially at her young age. Despite what she had been through in the past several months, she was still not quite 15 years old.

Since she did not want to take any more codeine herself, and it never occurred to her to sell or trade it to others, Aster would always pour it down the sink or toilet as soon as she got back to the women's quarters. However, despite having a large blind spot about the possibility of dealing drugs, she was aware that an empty bottle, after supposedly being just refilled, might arouse suspicion. She would refill the bottle with water and color and scent it with a combination of juices, cooking sherry, spices, or whatever else she could steal from the kitchen when she served meals. Her thefts were occasionally noticed, but not commented on. All the women stole food and alcohol. So long as their thefts did not become too great, they were tolerated. Periodically, she would make sure that one or more of the Bettys saw her drinking the liquid from the bottle. It tasted horrible. She drank it anyways.

Often, in order to make use of the night, Aster would sleep during the day, when she didn't have any duties. Sometimes she would pretend that the 'codeine' was making her sleepy. Other times, she would complain of headaches. If she got enough nap time in during the day, she was able to stay up much of the night, reading the medical books she 'borrowed' from Doctor Llewellyn's office while sitting up in bed with a small light. Afterwards, she would always hide them under her mattress. She kept a few of the Pre-War romance books on her dresser, so that if anyone noticed the light, they would think she was reading those. Some, she actually read. Just in case anyone asked her about the plot. But for the most part, she found them boring. She was vastly more interested in the medical books. She had determined to show up the sneering stablemaster, Daniel Wolfkiller, by finding out ever last weakness the Maestro had. Not that she would ever dare _tell _him. But she would still prove to herself that she was _smarter_ than him. She would show him up. But to find out any weaknesses that the ten foot tall monster might have, she needed to know as much as she possibly could about how the human body worked. After all, the Maestro had been human once. And, as she had seen, apparently still _was _sometimes.

Not all of the books she snuck out of Doctor Llewellyn's office were useful to Aster in understanding human anatomy and physiology. She did not have time to look through them during the few brief moments when she was left alone while her bottle of codeine was being refilled. Some of them were about Pre-War drugs that were no longer made today, even in the Maestro's palace. Some were about diseases, which she was pretty sure that the Maestro didn't have. Unless whatever made him ten feet tall and inhumanly strong was a disease of some sort, but she'd never heard a disease that made people stronger rather than weaker. Except maybe rabies, which made dogs and other animals go crazy and bite, and sometimes they seemed stronger because they were so crazed by the disease.

And, of course, some of the books were simply too far above her level of education for Aster to understand. The worst example of the latter was a book with a glossy grey cover that read 'Fundamentals of Biochemistry'. Aster wasn't quite clear on exactly what 'biochemistry' was, but had thought by the use of the word 'fundamentals', that the book would be fairly simple. However, the author of the book, someone by the name of Dr. Michael Morbius apparently had a rather different notion of what constituted 'fundamentals' than Aster did. Said notion being about 3 miles or so above her head. About the only thing she understood at all in the book was the occasional mention of some of the different types of alcohol such as ethanol and methanol. After struggling through several incomprehensible paragraphs, Aster slammed the book shut and stuck out her tongue at the picture of the author, a dark haired, rather sour-expressioned man in a turtleneck sweater, that was printed on the back cover of the book. Whoever Doctor Michael Morbius was, he was obviously so much smarter and better educated than her, that at this point she had about as much hope of successfully comprehending his 'Fundamentals of Biochemistry' as she had of successfully armwrestling the Maestro. She felt very tempted to draw a moustache on the picture's face to express her displeasure with the pre-War biochemist's apparent inability to explain anything _simply_, but decided against it. She still naively thought that Doctor Llewellyn was unaware of her 'borrowing' of his books, and if she made any sort of graffiti on the books, he might notice it and become suspicious.

Aster squinted at the picture of Dr. Michael Morbius (Ph. D. and Nobel Prize Winner according to a rather boastful short biography below his name). It seemed to her that she had heard that name somewhere before. But where? She couldn't remember. Well, it didn't matter. Probably she had just seen the book a few months before, back when she was still recovering from her injuries in the hospital and had tried reading some of Doctor Llewellyn's books out of boredom, and didn't remember it that well because she had still been on the codeine back then. She dismissed the nagging memory, and the next time she went back to get her pretended refill of codeine, she brought the book back, and while Doctor Llewellyn was in back, put it back on his shelf and instead got a book about the human eye, that was much more enjoyable to her because it was written more simply (at the freshman college level rather than the post-doctorate level like the 'Fundamentals of Biochemistry' and had a lot of pictures.

One duty that Aster had to do for the Maestro that she actually found to be somewhat interesting, was to (along with several other women) act as a 'decoration', sitting either on or near the Maestro when he held court. This was something that he did on the first day of every month, regardless of what day of the week it was. The Maestro did not, so far as Aster could tell, subscribe to any sort of religion, and had no concern for the religious practices of other. If others wanted (or, as was more often the case, were _required_) to attend his court on a day when they normally went to church, they would simply have to give up church for the day. The Maestro discouraged church going, anyways, though he did not outright forbid it. The few churches that existed in Dystopia were required to pay a large tax for the privilege of being allowed to exist and meet, and not having their building smashed to rubble in a few punches by the Maestro.

The 'court' sessions generally had the same format. They started out with various people paying tribute or taxes to the Maestro, which was either money, or a certain amount of goods. Occassionally, someone would not have whatever amount the Maestro had decided (exactly how he 'decided' other than by his own fickle whims, Aster wasn't sure) he owed, which never turned out well for them. The lucky ones were required to pay a greater amount, within a short period of time. The unlucky ones, which were actually in the majority, were sold as slaves, or had their children sold as slaves, or both. Sometimes their children were simply taken by the Maestro to serve him, rather than being sold. Often, from what Aster heard, parents who did not have sufficient goods or money to pay whatever amount the Maestro demanded sold their children to someone ELSE first, in order to get enough to pay off the Maestro, rather than have their children serving a monster. Probably they were the smart ones.

Very rarely, the Maestro would kill someone who did not have sufficient taxes or tributes, merely reaching out with one hand to snap their neck. Aster always cringed when that happened, but said nothing. She never learned what the tax defaulters who were killed had done worse or differently than the other ones. Probably it simply depended on the Maestro's whims at the time. The bodies generally lay where they were until after the 'court' session was over, as nobody was brave enough to ask the Maestro for permission to remove them.

After the first part of the 'court' session, in which taxes and tribute were paid, the Maestro then heard criminal cases, if there were any. Usually, there was not. 'Crime' in Dystopia was defined specifically as offenses against the Maestro, or his officials. Very few people were brave or stupid enough to do such a thing. Those who were, were more often than not executed on the spot, so 'criminal cases' were rare. So far as Aster could tell, all 'criminal cases' were found guilty, regardless of how much or how little evidence there was. After the inevitable guilty verdict, regardless of how trivial the offense was, the criminal was then executed on the spot (his body joining those of the less fortunate of those unable to pay their taxes and tribute).  
It was not the tax paying or the criminal parts of the Maestro's court sessions that Aster found interesting, but rather, the third part, in which the Maestro deigned to here 'disputes between citizens'. These were disagreements – sometimes criminal in nature, sometimes not – between people in Dystopia _other _than the Maestro and his officials. They varied in nature, and listening to them taught Aster a great deal about how people sometimes came into social conflict. There were so many things people could disagree about, ranging from who might own an unmarked cow, to where a fence should be located, to criminal things like theft and murder.

There were not that many 'disputes between citizens' which Aster found odd. It had been her experience that disagreements were frequent among people. She often disagreed with Thumb, the men who had worked for her father often disagreed about any number of things, as did the guards in the palace, and the various women who served the Maestro. Eventually, however, it became clear to Aster as to _why_ not very many private disputes were brought before the Maestro to settle. His 'justice' was not justice in any rational sense, but, rather, was either bought, or a popularity contest. If two women were in a dispute over who owned a grape vine on the border of their yards, the Maestro would inevitably find in favor of the prettier one. If two men were in dispute, the Maestro would always find in favor of whoever bribed him the most, or had the greater social status. Which generally were one and the same, anyways. From what Aster heard in rumors, most people, who felt they would not get justice from the Maestro, tried to settle their disputes amongst themselves in various ways, ranging from choosing someone else _other _than the Maestro to arbitrate for them, to fighting a duel in the streets. The Maestro did not seem to care about this, as he felt that settling disputes for 'the rabble' was a waste of his time anyways, and did not seem to understand that when people sought justice from sources other than himself, it cost him the respect that he craved.

All in all, although the 'court' sessions reminded her of something a King from one of her old fairytale books would do with his subjects, the fashion in which the Maestro chose to carry them out did not seem very 'Kingly'. It reminded her more of the way she had seen Thumb sometimes play with dolls, back when Thumb had been 4 or 5, spanking and throwing around the dolls that weren't quite as pretty, and putting the nicer looking ones in a toy cradle.

Aster knew that the Maestro had built Dystopia, right after the War, a long time ago. But it seemed as if he thought that once he had built the town, and let people move in and around it, that there was nothing further to do, and he could sit back and do nothing, or even wreck things, and the town and everything in it would go on just fine. But that didn't seem right to her at all. She knew that people long ago had built the Zoo, but once they built it and filled it with animals, they couldn't just sit back and do nothing. Even before the war, when there had been more machines, she knew that there had been many people who had to work-work-work all day long at the zoo, feeding and cleaning the animals, and making sure the visitors didn't cause trouble. They had to do it, to keep things at the Zoo running. If they had just sat around doing nothing, or having a party with the money the visitors paid, things would have fallen apart, everything would have gotten all dirty, and the animals would have died of illness or starvation.

It was the basic concept of _entropy, _but Aster was not familiar with that word. It simply seemed to her, that the Maestro wanted to _rule_ Dystopia, but he didn't want to _manage_ it. He merely wanted to _boss_ it around. To _play_ with it.

The times in which Aster was required to act as a decoration during the Maestro's 'court' sessions were interesting not only in that they gave her an opportunity to learn about the social interactions and disputes of most people (something Aster had difficulty understanding) but perhaps more importantly, gave her an opportunity to observe the Maestro himself. If you knew a lot about how the human body functioned, you could learn a lot about someone just by watching them. And after having been educated by her father for years, to take over the Bronx Zoo someday, Aster knew a lot about how animal bodies worked. Which was not very different from how human bodies worked. There were still gaps in her knowledge, but not many, and some of them were getting filled in by the books she 'borrowed' from Doctor Llewellyn's office.

It would not do, Aster knew, to let the Maestro suspect that she was watching him. So she never looked at him directly. It was a technique she had learned from hunting animals on the Outside, to supplement her family's food supply. Animals were not all that smart, and if you didn't look directly at them, would assume that you weren't interested in them at all. Stalking rabbits, Aster could get a lot closer to them by looking at them out of the side of her eyes, using her peripheral vision, and walking towards them _diagonally_, to the left or the right of the rabbit, rather than straight for it.

She now used the same technique of indirect observation with the Maestro, sitting on his lap, or on the dais in front of his throne, and directing a deliberately vacant gaze towards whoever was currently standing before him, or at one of the other women, or at one of the numerous lights or statues that decorated the room. Meanwhile, she would look at the green monster out of the corner of one eye, or in a brief direct gaze when she turned her head in a lethargic manner from one person or decoration to another.

There was a lot to see. For instance, the Maestro breathed regularly. That meant he probably required oxygen. It was impossible to tell how much, or how often. Some animals that breathed air, like turtles, could remain underwater for up to eight hours before drowning. Still, the fact that the Maestro did need to breath implied that he could potentially be suffocated, drowned, or affected by poison gas.

Equally informative was the fact that Aster could occasionally see a pulse in the blood vessels in the Maestro's wrist, as well as hear his heart beat in his chest on one horrid occasion when he made her straddle him right at his crotch and she was afraid that he would decide rape her again. The rape never happened, but when the Maestro finally tired of her and allowed her to leave, she leaned against the wall around one corner of the hallway, pressing her cheek to the cool marble, shaking with fear and relief for nearly an hour. It took all of her willpower then, not to immediately request a refill of her bottle of codeine from Doctor Llewellyn and actually take some of it for real this time.

_No codeine. _She could imagine the taste of it in her mouth, and the warm muzzy feeling and happy dreams she would have, even while still awake. But she had to think. The heartbeat along with the fact that he breathed meant that the Maestro's body was not that different from anyone else's, on the basic metabolic level. His cells needed oxygen. And fuel, as evidenced by the fact that the Maestro ate. In fact, he ate more than about 20 other people put together. The Maestro might have gained his incredible strength from radiation, perhaps was even _partly_ fueled by radiation (there was no way for Aster to tell if that was the case or not) but at least some aspects of his metabolism required the same combustion of food calories as almost every other organism on the planet. Potentially, he could be starved to death. Or poisoned.

The problem was, of course, summed up in the word 'Potentially'. Potentially, the Maestro could (maybe) be killed by suffocation, starvation, or poison. But the problem was the same as in a story Aster had read about mice who proposed belling a cat. In theory, the cat could have a bell put on it, and it would be very useful (to the mice) if it _did_ have a bell on it. But in practice, the cat was so dangerous to the mice, that no mouse could ever get a bell onto it. Likewise, there was nobody alive who could suffocate or starve the Maestro. Poison was, perhaps, a better possibility, but there was no way for Aster to know which poisons, if any, would be effective, and at what dosage.

There were a few other weaknesses that Aster noticed. Or perhaps, they would be better termed as limitations, areas where his abilities were no greater than an ordinary human beings. Mainly these were in the areas of senses. The Maestro couldn't see in the dark, the few times Aster saw him enter a dark area he either turned on a light before entering, or carried one. His hearing was, perhaps, only slightly better than normal. He was as sensitive to loud noises as other people, as Aster noticed him wince and cup his ears a few times when a loud note was played by one of the musicians who often played in the palace. He also couldn't fly, though being able to jump what seemed like a mile through the air was a pretty good substitute. Though not a perfect one. Birds could change direction in midflight. The Maestro could not. But since there was nobody around who could fly, all the old heroes having been either killed in the war, or by the Maestro, that fact was of little use, either.

There was a final possibility, perhaps about equal to the idea of poisoning the Maestro, that Aster came up with. The Maestro had long seen fit to humiliate her by forcing her to empty his chamber pot, and after reading a book about the human digestive system, it occurred to her that the fact that the Maestro's wastes smelled pretty much the same as everyone else meant that he had the same symbiotic bacteria living in his intestines, and helping to digest his food. It was believed that the Maestro could not get sick, and that his immune system was so powerful that it killed any microbe that dared invade him, but that couldn't be completely true. The bacteria in his guts obviously survived just fine. Where one sort of bacteria could survive, perhaps others could. Perhaps the Maestro could be infected with diseases, but his body just healed any damage caused by the disease so quickly, that neither he nor anyone else realized that he ever even _had_ a sickness. Was there some sort of really bad disease, somewhere, that could hurt his body faster than it could heal? Aster didn't know.

Utterly frustrating to her, of course, was the knowledge that the Maestro could, when he wanted, change back into an ordinary human being. Which Aster was certain he never did where anyone could see him and take advantage of the fact to kill him. She had no idea HOW he changed back. Probably some sort of hormone or other chemical in the body, but she had no idea what. She had no idea how to even begin to find out, and even if she had been able to find out, lacked both the knowledge and the means to be able to synthesize whatever substance was responsible in hopes of somehow getting the Maestro to breath it in or drink it. Maybe Michael Morbius, the author of that tremendously complicated book 'Fundamentals of Biochemistry' could have somehow found out and duplicated whatever hormone or chemical or whatever it was in the Maestro's body that turned him back to an ordinary person. But Aster, despite brilliant intelligence and one of the best educations to be had in the Post-War world, was nowhere near the post-doctorate and prize winning level of a brilliant pre-war scientist. She was just a scared, small for her age teenage girl, trying to find out by herself what all of the scientists who lived before the war had not been able to find out.

It wasn't fair. One day after being particularly frustrated, Aster went to the Hall of Fallen Heroes to glare at the remains. They had all had every advantage there was. They had been smart, had super-powers, had colleges where they learned all sorts of brilliant things, had computers and X-rays and who knew what else, and been able to work without having to worry about being raped or killed. And none of them had been able to find a way to kill the Maestro. So what hope did she have? She wasn't a Hero. She was just a stupid little girl, just like that horrible Daniel Wolfkiller said. A stupid girl who had gotten herself trapped in a horrible place. Wolfkiller was right. There was no way to kill the Maestro. He had no weaknesses. Or at least not any that could be used by regular people against him. Maybe if any of the heroes had still been alive, they could have somehow used the few tiny weaknesses Aster had seen. But they were all dead, despite all their smartness and super powers and computers and stuff.

It was depressing. It made her want the codeine again. To just go away and live in a dream until she died. Except she didn't want that, either. If she went to get the codeine, the way she felt, she'd probably drink the whole bottle, and then she _would _die.

It would have been little comfort to Aster to know that her breaking of her addiction to codeine, and subsequent observations of the Maestro had not gone entirely un-noticed, and had, in fact, been admired. The stablemaster, Daniel Wolfkiller, who had used hatred and pride to goad her into her current course of action, at first thought that he had failed, when he saw Aster going up to the hospital a few days later, to get her bottle of narcotics refilled. He had a violent argument with Doctor Llewellyn on the evening of the same day, about his refusing to provide the girl with any more codeine, but with no better results than his first attempt to get the physician to cut her off. And he did have a point. An addict wouldn't and couldn't stop their addiction unless they _wanted _to stop. There were plenty of drugs to be had in the Maestro's palace. If Aster wanted them, she would find a way to get them.

Some time later, however, when the stablemaster was required by the Maestro to attend his 'court' in order to act as an 'expert witness' in a case involving a man who claimed to have been kicked in the shoulder by a peddler's horse, he realized that he had not failed, after all. Aster, along with several other women in scanty outfits, was sitting on the floor near the Maestro's feet, staring out a window with a blank expression on her face. Or, so it seemed. Only someone who had hunted, like Wolfkiller often did, would have noticed that Aster always pointed her vacant, apparently drugged gaze, in a direction just so, at just the right angle that the Maestro was about 45 degrees from the center of her gaze, where seeing things with the peripheral vision was not too difficult. And that every so often, her eyes would flick straight towards the huge, green monstrosity, getting a good look at him straight on, before she turned her head to look at a chandelier, or the lace on someone's sleeve.

_Stoned, my ass. _Wolfkiller thought. _That girl is __not __stoned, on codeine, or anything like it. I don't know what she's doing with the stuff Llewellyn is giving her, using it as a hair rinse or feeding it to her stuffed toy tiger, but she sure as hell isn't drinking it any more. Because what she's doing isn't being stoned. It's __hunting._

The stablemaster found a pretext to attend the Maestro's farcical, and often lethal, court sessions a few more times. He pretended interest in the criminal cases and disputes between civilians, but his real interest was Aster. And her behavior was always the same. Always watching her prey without letting the prey know it was being watched. Always _hunting._ Only someone else who had hunted, like Wolfkiller, would have known another hunter. It was lucky for Aster, he reflected, that the Maestro didn't hunt. Probably couldn't hunt, large as he was, and most likely didn't need to. The green brute was strong and fast enough to smash anything or anyone he wanted to, without needing to sneak up on them.

Unless, of course, he couldn't _find _them, or _see_ them. That needed hunting skills. Obviously, he couldn't _see_ Aster. He couldn't _see_ her real value before, and he couldn't _see_ what Aster was doing now, watching him from the edge of her slack face.

But what could Aster see? That was the real question. He had manipulated her into watching the Maestro, and trying to find a weakness. But were there any to find? That was the question.

Well, no, actually, the stablemaster was forced to admit to himself. It was actually only part of the question. Even if the Maestro did have weaknesses, it was by no means certain that Aster could find them, especially with the limited means of observation at her disposal. And then there was the last question, the one that kept bothering Wolfkiller.

_Even if he does have a weakness, and even if the girl by some miracle finds it, just what makes you think she'll tell you?_ Wolfkiller was forced to ask himself. _Why should she tell you, when she hates you?_

Like many of the questions that Aster had asked herself, it was something to which Wolfkiller had no answer.


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter 12. The Ship 'FANTASII'

When Aster was 15, and had been living in the Maestro's palace as his slave and an sometime sex-toy for some of his favored guards (the latter of which never stopped causing her pain due to her internal scarring), something rather unusual happened one day, when the Maestro was holding one of his monthly 'court' sessions.

Or perhaps not unusual, but at least different enough from the norm that Aster remembered the incident for the rest of her life. The Maestro had just finished collecting taxes and tribute from several people, and had snapped the neck of an unfortunate man who failed to provide him with a sufficient number of barrels of apple beer, because the trees had not produced well. The man gave an explanation that Aster found fairly interesting, about how there was a shortage of honey bees, and he had been unable to obtain a sufficient number of hives of bees to pollinate the blossoms on the trees that spring. The Maestro did not seem to even bother to listen to what the man had to say, and grew visibly irritated when the man began complaining that much of the reason that there was a bee shortage had to do with the Maestro's gluttonous demands for large amounts of honey, leaving the beekeepers with insufficient honey to keep all of their bees from starving over the winter. When the unfortunate orchard owner began reciting from a piece of paper where he had written down a long list of facts and figures regarding how many bees it took to pollinate an acre of apple trees, and how many pints of honey said number of bees required to survive over the winter, boredom joined the irritation on the Maestro's face.

The orchard owner might have known a lot about apples and bees, but Aster saw that when it came to the Maestro, he was a great fool. It was foolish to try to reason with the monster. It was foolish to even show off to too great a degree that you were _capable_ of reason. The Maestro wanted obedience, and results. Not intelligence. If the man had been wise, he wouldn't have even tried to give any reasons for his failure to produce sufficient apple beer, and merely begged for mercy and promised twice as much apple beer the following year. As it was, after listening to the facts and figures regarding bees and apples for barely fifteen seconds, the Maestro reached out one terrible, muscled hand, and with a swift motion, twisted the man's head quickly, snapping his neck. Aster was horrified, but not shocked. There was always at least one death at every court session. If not of someone who failed to pay sufficient taxes and tribute, then of someone who was found guilty of 'crimes' against the Maestro or his officials.

The main thing Aster wondered about, looking at the limp body of the orchard owner on the ground, was exactly how the Maestro thought he was going to get any apple beer at all, now that the man was dead. Aster recalled a book she had coverless book she had found in a trash can in the Maestro's palace a few months back. There had been a phrase in it, that she felt described the Maestro quite well.

_All he wants is production. Without people who are able to produce. What makes him think it's possible?_

It was interesting, reading the book, and gave Aster an idea about how intricate, and interconnect, the industrial base and economy of the pre-War world had been. You needed steel and coal to run railroads, but you also needed railroads to ship the steel and coal. And you needed farmers to grow food for all the miners and railroad people, but the farmers needed metal for their tools and railroads to ship the food they grew. It was hard to tell where it started and ended. How did such a complex system even get made in the first place. Probably from the bottom up, with a lot of hand labor and horse carts, before you could have enough steel and coal for the first trains. It was almost like what she knew about ecology and evolution and the food chain. You had to have bacteria at the bottom, and they got eaten by tiny fish and insects, or nourished plants, which fed larger animals, and other larger animals after that. Then when the animals died, their bodies rotted, the worm had it's due, as her father would have put it, and it went back to bacteria again. Break either the system of economics or the system of ecology too badly, and it would be very hard to put it back together again.

Come to think of it, the words were similar, they started with 'eco'. Maybe that meant something. And both systems were badly broken in Dystopia. The old industries were nearly gone, except for a few still-working machines in the Maestro's palace, and most people simply scavenged what they could, but didn't really make much. The same thing with the plants and animals. They were gradually dying, year by year. What the war hadn't killed, the Maestro was busy finishing off with his gluttonous appetites and mindless, dysgenic policies.

How did you fix an ecology or an economy? Aster didn't know. The book suggested that once an economy was broken, everything went back to horse farming for a long time. Which was much what was going on in the Outside of Dystopia. And what happened to an ecology? Maybe nothing survived but bacteria and bugs for a long time.

It was a good book, and Aster had hidden it below the bottom drawer of her dresser in the women's quarters. Or partly a good book, anyways. It had a lot of good ideas for dealing with deliberately obstructive and hateful people, including a man, who had designed horrible weapons, much like the Maestro once had, and ended up by being killed by his own weapon. However, the book did not seem to make many accommodations for people who were genuinely weak or sick, or for much human kindness. Well, no book was perfect. At least she could understand the book, which was called _Atlas Shrugged_, as it was written in at least somewhat comprehensible language, rather than inscrutable acadamese like the wretched _Fundamentals of Biochemistry._ And it was interesting reading about the trains and steel mills and other things that people before the War had had. Too bad she didn't have a train to run the Maestro down with. Or a sound ray weapon like the one in the book that had killed it's own wretched inventor to blow him up with. Or maybe the sound rays had disintegrated things. It wasn't quite clear to Aster from the way the book described the sound ray weapon exactly _how_ it had worked, but one was probably as bad as the other. Or as good as the other, if it were the Maestro getting blown up or disintegrated.

Despite the fact that the death of the orchard owner, and his fruitless explanation of his problems had reminded Aster very much of what was written in her secret book, it was not the Maestro's casual execution of him that caught Aster's attention during that particular court session. Rather, it was something that happened later, right at the very end of the court session, after the criminal trials and the settling of 'disputes between civilians'.Generally, after all that was settled, the Maestro would ask if anyone had any 'requests' of him, or 'concerns they wished to speak about. In the time Aster had been in the palace, a little over a year, nobody had ever dared approach the Maestro with any 'requests' or 'concerns'. Aster did not think that anybody ever would. It would take an unusually foolish, or unusually brave man to dare do so.

But today, much to Aster's astonishment, there was such a brave, or foolish man. When the Maestro asked if anyone had any requests or concerns they wished to speak to him about, a deep, gravelly voice said: "I have one request, my Lord."

If Aster was astonished that _anyone_ would dare make a request of the Maestro, she was even _more_ astonished by who made the request. It was one of the people she hated most in the world, and had thought a pig and a coward. The stablemaster, Daniel Wolfkiller.

_Now, what in the fuck does __**HE**__ want? _Aster wondered as the Maestro waved one large green hand to indicate that the unkempt man should approach him. _A private room in his stables to keep a couple of women in? Or a bigger liquor ration?_

Those seemed the sorts of selfish, piggish things that Aster thought, based on her opinion of the man, that Wolfkiller would ask for. But if Aster had been surprised that _anyone _dare make a request of the Maestro, and amazed that Daniel Wolfkiller, of all people, had the balls to do so, she was completely dumbfounded by what he asked for, which was not for women, drink, or money, or any of the self-indulgent things she would have thought he would want to get.

Rather, Wolfkiller began telling the Maestro that the remaining tiger, which had been neglected in it's cage for over a year now, was in poor condition due to starvation and disease, had become feral, and given those facts, and the absence of the other tiger, was really of no further use to anyone, and was merely eating up meat to no good purpose. Wolfkiller asked the Maestro for permission to 'dispose' of the animal, and to relocate it's cage to a better area, where it could be used for his Wardogs.

The Maestro looked slightly surprised at the request, as if he hadn't really thought about the remaining tiger in a long time. To her guilt, Aster realized it had been a long time, over a year, since she had thought about the tiger, as well. She remembered how dirty, and sick, and weak it had been in it's cage. It's poor eyes all miserable and lonely and full of pain. And the poor thing was still alive. How could that be? Surely it would have starved by now, with no-one taking care of it…

_Wolfkiller was taking care of it._ She realized. _Not well, probably the Maestro wasn't giving him any more food for the tiger once he got tired of using it as a toy, and there probably wasn't much he could do about it being sick, and lonely, and cramped in that little cage, but he must have been feeding it, somehow, all this time._

The Maestro, after his initial slight surprise at being reminded of the existence of the tiger he had nearly forgotten about, nodded his head, giving Wolfkiller permission to 'dispose' of it. Aster felt small and bad, and slumped down on the step of the dais where she was sitting. She had thought Daniel Wolfkiller to be a horrible, hateful, pig of a man, given to nothing but drinking and sex and making hateful comments to her, but he had been taking care of the tiger all this time when it's sufferings had completely slipped Aster's mind, and she had been selfishly concerned only with her own miseries. She was no better than the Maestro himself, maybe, to forget and not even care about the poor tiger for over a year. It was the last thing left in the palace, other than herself and the stuffed toy tiger, Tony, that had come from her home, from the Bronx Zoo. And she had forgotten all about it.

Having been given the Maestro's permission to get rid of the nearly forgotten tiger, Wolfkiller left the throne room, unslinging the rifle he wore over his shoulder as he did so.

The usual chatter in the throne room had actually been silenced by shock, at the audacity of someone daring to ask any sort of request of the Maestro, but it restarted hesitantly, as if to cover up the discomfort of the people present. Aster barely heard the chatter, she tuned it out, listening hard for something else. Something that came, in less than ten minutes.

A single shot.

Somewhere in Aster's head, warm metal gears, turned to ice.

_Why'd he do it?_ Aster wondered, still wanting to believe that the filthy man was all bad. She would have done it herself, to end the tiger's obvious misery, if only she had remembered how it was suffering, and if only she had been allowed to leave the palace, or to own a rifle. But she was just a stupid helpless girl who was stuck here and couldn't even help herself. Of course, it could be, that Wolfkiller hated the tiger, because he was afraid of it, and it had clawed his arm once. That he hated it and liked it's suffering, but then why feed it at all, or put it out of it's misery. Just for the cage? There were plenty of cages to be had around the Maestro's palace. Aster had been brought there in one. She felt cold and miserable at the same time. She felt like she wasn't a real person. Real people were happy, and didn't have horrible things done to them, and didn't forget for over a whole year about poor animals who couldn't even help themselves suffering and dying in cages.

Wondering about Wolfkiller's motivation in killing the tiger joined many of the other mysteries that Aster had to think about, during her free time. She actually had more of it than most of the other women, the 'Betty's' who, for God only knew what reason, seemed to be concerned with 'Pleasing the Maestro' and would volunteer for extra duties when they didn't have to. Occassionally, worried that _not _volunteering for extra duties might somehow attract attention to herself, Aster would do so as well, but was somewhat particular in the _sort_ of duties she volunteered for. She would never volunteer to participate in any of the frequent orgies that occurred, and could not help but wonder at the sanity of the women who _did_ volunteer to attend them. Perhaps they thought they would be rewarded or freed if they 'pleased the Maestro' enough, but from what Aster could see, that was a fool's hope. The Maestro only let women go when he tired of them, usually after they lost their looks. Often, they died from his 'attentions' long before that happened. Sometimes they simply vanished, and Aster didn't dare to ask what had happened to them.

The problem with participating in the orgies was not merely the risk of being used by the Maestro, and subsequently ending up in the hospital (or dead), but the fact that the events were, quite frankly, obscene. Sometimes Aster wondered about that concept. People thought of things that were 'obscene' as being 'dirty', but it seemed to Aster, that that was merely part of the truth. Dirt was dirty, as were sick people, or chamber pots (such as the Maestro's that she had to empty), but they weren't _obscene. _Neither was it simply all the sex that was the problem. Animals mating in the zoo, or collecting their sperm for artificial insemination had never really bothered her.

The whole concept of _obscenity _was, perhaps, a lesser form of sacrilege. An act of pointless vandals. Taking something that _was_, or normally _ought _to have been clean and healthy, and making it sick and dirty. Which is what the orgies were, as was, now that she thought about it, what had happened to the once magnificent tiger she and her father had trained, left to rot and starve and die alone in a cage, until Wolfkiller finally put a stop to it. It was the Maestro who had destroyed the tiger. He enjoyed destroying everything. Probably he thought the orgies were funny, watching people actually volunteer to do something obscene, to destroy _themselves,_ in front of him.

Come to think of it, Aster had never actually seen Daniel Wolfkiller at any of the orgies. Which, once she realized it, actually surprised her. Participating in an orgy seemed like the sort of thing she would have expected the grubby stablemaster to do, so she had merely assumed for the past year or so that he was doing so. Yet she had never actually seen him at one, despite bringing in wine and grapes from the kitchen as refreshments for the participants. It was actually surprising to her that he would _not _be there. But then, it had been surprising to her that he had actually been brave enough to make a request of the Maestro, let alone the one that he had.

Aster counted herself lucky that the Maestro had never forced her to participate in one of the orgies she found so disgusting, and rather than attract attention by not volunteering for _anything,_ generally would offer to help in the kitchen, serving food, or washing dishes. It gave her a chance to steal the spices, sherry, and other things she used to create a fake 'codeine' solution in her bottle, and she also got to eat a lot of table scraps, which weren't too bad if you cut off the part that had been chewed on.

And she needed the food. Lately, she had been ravenous most of the time. After a lifetime of being short for her age, she was actually starting to grow. Her breasts filled out, and the sheer green brassiere she wore under her dress no longer looked like a ludicrous empty sack. Aster's father had been tall, and she couldn't remember her mother very well, but some of her old dresses and other clothing that her father had kept had been large enough that her father likely could have worn them. So, if both her parents had been tall, perhaps she would someday be tall a well. If she lived that long. Not that there weren't advantages to being small. Aster sometimes still remembered that insomniac night, when she had first stopped taking the codeine, and had seen the Maestro in a human form, through a vent. The shelf stacked with crates that she had been hiding behind had actually been very close to the wall, and only someone as small as Aster had been back then could have squeezed behind it, to see what she saw.

About a month after Daniel Wolfkiller granted a final mercy to the sick tiger he had helped train, the Maestro got, from someplace or the other, some new thought in his head about a new toy that he wanted. Apparently some scavengers who worked for him, bringing back gold and gems and still functional pieces of pre-War machinery, had located something called the 'Goodyear Blimp' in a warehouse some distance from Dystopia. The warehouse had been fairly intact, only the windows broken, and the 'Goodyear Blimp' was apparently in fairly good condition. After they described what they had found to the Maestro, he immediately ordered several truck drivers and operators of other machines that Aster had never seen before to go to the warehouse and bring the 'Goodyear Blimp' back to his palace.

The Maestro was very excited about the find, and wouldn't stop talking about it to anyone who would listen (which was pretty much everyone, as nobody would dare to _not_ to him). He even spoke to Aster about it, one day while she was sitting below his throne.

"I'm going to have the blimp dyed green, Betty." He said to Aster. He no longer called her Aster or 'Little Zookeeper' and Aster often wondered if he even remembered why he had brought her here in the first place, for reading too many books. But then, if he had forgotten, he wouldn't have kept humiliating her by forcing her to be the only one required to empty his chamber pot every time he used it.

"What will you do with it? What does a blimp do, anyways?" Aster asked him, despite the fact that she had read all about blimps in old books. But pretending to be stupid was safer. And it was a safe question. The Maestro liked to hear himself talk, and brag.

"Like I said, first I'll dye it green. And have it mended and repaired. Then once it's working, I can fly around on it, above the city and the ocean. Perhaps even to Iceland, who knows. I'll have to rename it, though. 'The Goodyear Blimp' is a stupid name. There are no more Goodyear tires. I think I'll call it 'The Green Fantasy'."

The Maestro went on at some length, describing his plans to put a dock for 'The Green Fantasy' on the highest story of his palace, and perhaps to even fly it to Iceland and conquer the place, as their 'political radio broadcasts' annoyed him, and the 'rabble needed to learn their place'.

"Perhaps I'll even let you ride with me, little zookeeper" said the Maestro after his long monologue that Aster had mostly ignored, showing that he had not at all forgotten where she had come from. "You can ride above the city and look down at it. Maybe we'll even fly above your zoo, and you can wave down at your father. Would you like that?"

Aster nodded, forcing back tears. She had tried not to think about her father, and the zoo, and had mostly succeeded. She didn't know if her father even knew she was still alive, or thought about her at all. Maybe it would be better if her father thought that she was dead, like the tiger Wolfkiller had shot.

The Maestro then went on again about all the places he wanted to visit in the blimp. Aster forced herself to look impressed, and nodded at the right places. But privately, she thought that the Maestro was acting like a little boy, about to get a new toy. Just like the tigers. Thinking of how that had ended up, she wondered how long it would take the Maestro to tire of 'The Goodyear Blimp', once he got it. Or what would happen if he didn't get it, or were somehow disappointed with it. She sure as hell wouldn't want to be around if that happened.

The latter thought turned out, weeks later, to be downright prophetic. Getting the pre-War blimp out of the warehouse where it had been stored, and back to the Maestro's palace, took only a few days, and several trips with trucks, and cranes, and other such machines. _Repairing _it, once it was back at the palace, was a far more difficult and lengthy process. Dying it bright green, to please the Maestro, was easy enough. Green dye was manufactured in the palace, and there were countless barrels of the stuff. But dying it didn't fix the more serious problems of the inevitable decay to a century old airship. There were holes in the fabric of the blimp, and parts of it had to be patched or replaced. And it wasn't any old sort of fabric, either, it was some fantastic pre-war stuff with 'kevlar fibers' and who knew what else. Metal valves and other parts had to be replaced from smaller hot-air balloons, or custom made on metal lathes in the Maestro's palace.

Then there were more serious problems. Apparently the blimp had, in the past, been filled with helium, which in the post—War world was simply over the rainbow. There _was_ no helium to be gotten. Not even when the Maestro, in the middle of an argument (or rather a once sided screaming fit on his part and apologetic groveling on the part of everyone else) with the men repairing the blimp, seized one of them and squeezed his head so hard that he gasped and began kicking. The Maestro released him, still alive, but with a fractured jaw, much to everyone's surprise and relief. The man staggered off to Doctor Llewellyn's hospital.

But there was still no helium to be gotten. There was talk of somehow converting the blimp to use hot air to levitate, but when the cold facts were presented, that hot air would simply not provide enough lift to support the Maestro's weight, that notion was dropped. The blimp was filled with hydrogen, gotten by electrolysis of water. Smoking, lanterns, candles, or open flames or sparks of any sort were forbidden within 500 feet of the blimp on penalty of immediate execution. When serving the men who were fixing the blimp at meals, Aster heard them occasionally whispering about something called a 'Hindenberg'. They never whispered it when the Maestro was anywhere near them, however, and Aster was afraid to ask what the 'Hindenberg' was. It must have been something truly terrible, if the men were afraid to talk about it in front of the Maestro.

Even the hydrogen, though apparently it actually provided more lift than helium would have, was simply not sufficient to deal with certain realities. The blimp had been designed to carry ordinary human beings, who even if very overweight, seldom weighed more than 300 lbs. And a heavy person on one side of the blimp's cabin could be balanced by other people, on the opposite side. However, the Maestro was 10 feet tall, and weighed over 1000 lbs. The entire cabin of the blimp had to be rebuilt, to accommodate his height. It was far more difficult to accommodate his weight. The Goodyear blimp had been built for no more than 6 passengers, plus the crew. The Maestro weighed as much as 6 ordinary people, and the few crew members who could get on with him, and still not go above the airship's weight capacity, could not counterbalance 1000 lbs of green tyrant. If he moved to the front, back, or sides of the blimp, the airship would tilt dangerously. There was thought of eliminating the water used as ballast, to gain more lift, but that was far too dangerous as well. All the Maestro could do was sit in the exact center of the cabin, the few times he went up in new floating toy, and look at the skyline, as approaching any window to look down at his palace or the city of Dystopia caused the ship to tilt downwards towards wherever he stood.

The Maestro grew frustrated with this problem caused by his weight, and blamed the obviously terrified men who had used old books they found to train themselves to pilot it.

_All you have to do is change back, to human._ Aster thought, when she saw a particularly sour expression on the Maestro's face one day, while he was gazing out a window, upwards at the bright green blimp. _Change back, and you can ride on the blimp with no problems. And I can __**kill**__ you with no problems._

Perhaps it was the knowledge that almost every one of the humans he terrorized, would kill him in an instant, if he ever once turned back into his weak, human form in front of him, and that they would stop at nothing to find a way to force him to change back, if they knew the possibility existed, that prevented the Maestro from doing so. Probably mobs of them would be working night and day to try and decipher '_Fundamentals of Biochemistry' _and every other book that might tell them what sort of hormone or chemical or whatever could be used to force the Maestro to return to a human form. No, Aster thought, thinking that the Maestro would not even take off his clothes when he had sex, the tyrant would never display an hint of vulnerability in front of anyone else. Ever. Even though it cost him the ability to ride on his latest toy. And though neither Aster nor the Maestro knew it, it would eventually cost him a great deal more than a mere ride on a rebuilt Pre-War novelty airship.

Riding around in the exact center of the blimp grew boring for the Maestro after five or six times. He then decided on a new project. Dystopia had been built partly on the remains of the old city of New York, which was on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. The ocean in the area was polluted and radioactive of course, and the few fish that existed, dangerous to eat, but that was irrelevant to the Maestro's latest thought. Having found that he could not ride one sort of ship, he determined to ride another. He got together the mechanics and engineers who had rebuilt the Goodyear Blimp for him, and set them to work repairing an old cruise ship, and restructuring it to accommodate his height. His weight was not a problem. Large ocean going cruise ships were built to carry tens of thousands of tons.

The ship was repainted bright green, and renamed 'The Green Fantasy', just like the blimp had been. The green airship, that had so disappointed the Maestro was renamed, it was now just called 'FANTASII' in capital letters. Aster wasn't sure if that was meant to be a plural of the word 'Fantasy' or if the last two letters 'II' were meant to be the Roman numeral '2'. Either way, it didn't really make much sense to her, as the blimp had come first, so it should have been the ocean liner that was given the plural or numerically higher designation. But in the Maestro's universe, the things most important to him always came first, regardless of the logic of doing so. Certainly neither Aster nor anyone else was going to risk starting an argument with him about a rather minor grammatical point. Hell, nobody would even risk starting an argument with him about rape and murder.

Work on the ocean going 'Green Fantasy' proceeded apace. The mechanics and engineers who worked for the Maestro seemed determined to redeem themselves from his disappointment in the blimp, despite the fact that it was hardly their fault that the Ship Fantasii could not be made to accommodate his half-ton weight.

Aster still watched the Maestro, but learned little that was new. Yet she did not give up. Hunting required patience.


	13. Chapter 13

Chapter 13. Lusus Naturae

_The sea was wet as wet could be,__  
__The sands were dry as dry.__  
__You could not see a cloud, because__  
__No cloud was in the sky:__  
__No birds were flying overhead -__  
__There were no birds to fly. – _Lewis Carroll

The work on repairing and refurbishing the cruise ship was done shortly before Aster turned 16, and she and all the other women were invited by the Maestro to travel on the ship with him, up and down several miles of coastline, so he could survey from sea, all that he owned on the land. All of his female slaves were forced to go with him, to act as decorations and toys. Aster was actually a bit excited, she had never been on a boat before (unless you counted a toy raft made out of boards she had once made as a child to float around on in a small pond at the zoo). Once the ship, _The Green Fantasy, _had gotten several hundred yards away from the land, Aster scampered up and down the deck excitedly, amazed at how far you could see to the horizon. The Maestro and his followers were all on the left side of the boat, near the spot where they had first boarded, so she went around the front, to the left side, putting the large cabin between herself and everyone else, so she could look at the ocean in peace. There was so much water! Miles of it! And who knew how deep! Miles deep too, probably! The waves were also interesting, she liked looking at their shapes, and the foam on them. Her old fairy tale books had said that mermaids turned into foam when they died.

Except there were no mermaids, of course. Aster looked down into the water, which was amazingly clear, trying to see if she could see any fish, since they looked something like mermaids. But there weren't any fish, either. After looking at the lifeless water for over an hour, listening to one wave after another splashing against the side of the huge boat, she started to get bored. There weren't any other ocean noises, just the thrum of the _Green Fantasy's _engine, and the chatter of people talking in a crowd at one end of the boat. Aster decided that maybe it wasn't a good idea to stand out, by being off by herself, and decided to go back to the front of the boat where everyone else was. Besides, she was getting hot and sunburned as well. The sun seemed brighter and hotter on the ocean, than on land. Maybe because there were no trees for shade. There weren't even any clouds up in the sky that day. And after having been confined to the Maestro's palace for nearly two years, where the only sunlight was the occasional patch through a window, her skin had gotten pretty pale.

She was thirsty, too. Aster didn't know you could get so thirsty, when surrounded by so much water. But you couldn't drink ocean water, it was too salty. Maybe it was the temptation of the sight of water that you couldn't drink, along with the heat and salt in the air that made her so thirsty. It was a craving that actually seemed more intense than any she had ever felt for codeine, even when she had first stopped taking it. But then, unlike codeine, water was something you actually _needed_ to survive, so it probably made sense that people would crave it so badly when they got thirsty enough.

As Aster made her was around the rest of the deck, to rejoin the crowd and find something to drink, she saw to her surprise that the Maestro brought his green blimp, the _Fantasii, _ along as well, tethered to the rear of the cruise ship by a steel cable. The enormous ocean vessel, which seemed nearly as big as the Maestro's palace, pulled along the relatively trivial weight of the airship with no difficulty whatsoever. Aster wondered exactly _why_ the Maestro had brought the blimp along, but soon had her question answered. When they were well out at sea, the Maestro took the steel cable that tethered the blimp to the rear of the boat, and using his incredible strength, pulled it in as easily as if it had been a child's toy balloon, such as in pictures Aster had seen in old books.

He waved invitingly to the female slaves he had brought. "Any of you want to take a ride on the blimp?" He offered, as he got the huge airship lowered to within a few inches of the deck of the ocean cruiser.

The Bettys begain chattering excited. They had never been allowed onto the _Fantasii _before. Only the Maestro and the blimp crew had ever been on it. Being able to actually _fly_ was a rare treat, capping off the unusual holiday that they had just by being allowed to go with the Maestro on the ocean cruise. Aster held back and let the others get on. She was afraid of heights. And she didn't trust the Maestro. Or the blimp. Living as a slave in the Maestro's palace had made her wary of being trapped. It was why she always kept in mind which was the nearest unlocked door through which she could hide from Paul Rasse and his rapist buddies whenever she ventured out of the women's quarters. It was important to always have an escape route in mind. But what was the escape route from that blimp? Straight down a few hundred feet into the ocean? She was a good swimmer, but didn't know much about diving and doubted she could survive a fall like that.

The Maestro didn't seem to notice her not boarding the blimp. It could only hold a certain number of people, anyways, because of it's low weight capacity, and there were far more women on the cruise ship than would fit into the blimp. _Fools,_ Aster thought, as she saw them giggling and laughing inside the blimp. _Don't they know enough by now to __**never **__trust anything he does?_

Aster's fears about the blimp proved well founded. Once the women had gotten in and sat down in the seats, the Maestro let the steel cable feed back out of his hands, so the blimp rose in the air, with the women inside. Then, once the blimp had risen as far as the length of the cable would allow, the Maestro waited a few moments, until the female passengers had gotten comfortable enough with being in the airship to venture out of their seats, and look out the windows. A few of them waved through the glass, at the Maestro and the other people on the boat.

Then the Maestro gave the steel cable a sudden, hard _jerk_! The women, who had been standing up in the blimp, were all thrown partly across the cabin, landing on the seats or against the wall on the opposite side. Aster thought she saw a gout of blood splash against the glass.

_I never thought I'd be glad to be afraid of anything_, Aster thought, _But I'm bloody well glad just now that I'm afraid of heights, and afraid of him. If I weren't afraid of them, it would be ME up there with them._

The Maestro pulled and yanked on the steel cable of the blimp several more times, once jerking it down nearly to the surface of the ocean. It reminded Aster of how she had once played with a kite her father had made for her and Thumb. Jerking and yanking on the string and making the kite weave and dive in the air. Except the blimp was no kite. Or maybe it was, to someone as large and strong as the Maestro. A big, giant kite with his human dolls on it for him to terrify with the ride. It reminded her of some of the snotty boys who sometimes visited the zoo, and tried to scare the small animals, such as the bats, in the Mouse House, by banging on their cages. Aster would punch them in the nose when she saw them doing that. But nobody could punch the Maestro. He was too strong, and had no weaknesses, just like Wolfkiller had said.

Eventually, most of the Bettys seemed to give up trying to stand while the Maestro yanked the airship around, and from the little Aster could see, were either laying on the floor, or clinging desperately to the seats in the cabin. The Maestro yanked on the cable a few more times, then grew bored, and began pulling the blimp back down. As it got closer to the deck, Aster could hear moaning and sobbing from the unfortunate women who had been inside, and when the door was opened, she saw not only blood, but vomit as well. The terrified women staggered and crawled out, some of them cringing in terror at the Maestro's feet, others wandering in a daze, or simply lying limp in shock. One of the Betty's that had been on the blimp had a broken leg, and the Maestro ordered two of his guards to carry her off the blimp after the rest of the women had gotten off.

Once the first load of victims had finally all left (or been carried) off the airship _Fantasii, _Aster got worried that the Maestro might try to make some other people – such as herself – go up in the blimp so that he could play the same game with them. She was already standing in the shadows, due to her sunburn, and stealthily backed away, ducking into a convenient door that led to a dining area. It was mostly empty, just one chair was occupied by one of the Bettys. Betty 31, Aster thought. She had bright red hair in a coiled braid that was fastened to the back of her head with jeweled clips set with white gems. Aster winced at the clips. She had been made to wear them during that horrible mockery of a wedding feast with the Maestro, nearly two years earlier. She never did find out what had happened to them, sometime after her nearly lethal rape by the Maestro, and her awakening in Doctor Llewellyn's hospital, they had gone missing. She didn't really care. She hated them and hoped she would never see them again. The Maestro had forced her to grown her hair longer, and she had to wear jeweled clips in it like the other women, to keep from standing out and attracting attention, but at least they weren't _those_ particular clips. She generally picked the red ones, not the white ones. And definitely not the green ones. She hated the color green and everything that was that color. If she could have gotten a different colored dress and worn it safely, she would have.

Betty 31 noticed her. "What's he doing with the airship?" she asked in a tremulous voice.

So this woman, at least, had been smart as Aster had, in not getting onto the blimp.

"I don't know." Aster glanced out the smeared window of the empty dining room, but couldn't see either the Maestro or the blimp from the angle she was at. "I'm not going out there to find out. And I'm not staying here, either, waiting for the door to open."

She heard more sobbing and a few shrieks from outside. Probably the women who had been on the blimp, being further terrorized by the Maestro. Or possibly other people being forced into it, so the Maestro could play the same sick game with them. Aster pointed towards a door on the far side of the dining area. "We should go through there, and find someplace to keep out of the way for a while. At least until _he_ gets tired of what he's doing."

It wasn't necessary to explain who _he _was. Betty 31 nodded, and followed after Aster like a lost puppy. The door led to a kitchen area, filled with mostly silver colored counters, stoves, and sinks, and on the far end of that was a staircase going down. The sight of the sinks brought back her thirst, and she turned on a faucet slightly, so as not to make much noise, then lowered her head down and sucked the water greedily directly from the metal plumbing. Once she had satisfied her thirst, Aster turned the faucet back off, gestured to Betty 31 to follow her, went down the stairs, and found herself in a large hallway. There were doors on either side. Opening the first one, Aster saw a room full of cans and boxes. Food stocked for the voyage, obviously

"We can hide here, for a while." She told Betty 31. "Lunch was only an hour ago, so it'll be a few hours, at least, before anyone comes in here to get food to start making supper. By that time, _he'll _have probably gotten tired of shaking people around in that blimp, and we'll be safe."

"No, we won't be." Betty 31 said, and Aster couldn't disagree with her. "Is _he_ always like this? Doesn't he ever get better?"

"No. He's never any better. A lot of times, he's worse_."_ Aster said. Lying wouldn't help. "You either need to keep on his good side, or do what I do, and try to just keep quiet and out of his way, most of the time."

"I wish I'd never come here." Betty 31 sniffed, and sat down against a crate that said 'Canned Cherries'. A red stain ran down one side of it, probably one of the cans was leaking. "But the place I came from was awful, too. When we heard that this place existed, we thought we would come here. That it would be better. That the monster wouldn't be here. But it's not better here. It's worse. There are hardly even any plants or animals or anything to eat here, and _he's _worse than the monster was. He does horrible tricks. I just knew the blimp had to be a trick, he never would do anything nice. Not for real. That's why I hid in the dining room."

"Wait a minute…" Aster shook her head. What Betty 31 was saying sounded like ravings that you could expect from a drunk. She knew that most of the Bettys were given to drink or drugs, to deal with their life as the sex toys of the Maestro and his favored guards. Aster held her head in her hands. "I'm sorry. I don't understand what you're saying. You're saying that you don't come 'from here'? Do you mean you come from the Outside? The Wastelands?"

She knew as she said it, that that didn't entirely make sense, either. While it was true that the Maestro took a lot of the better looking young women from the Outside (or the Wastelands, as some people called them), there were far fewer plants and animals in the Outside than there were within the city limits of Dystopia. Not more. The farther one got from the shield that the Maestro used to protect people from radiation, the worse the radiation got, and the fewer plants and animals there were. It was why the farmers on the Outside had such a difficult time growing sufficient crops to feed themselves, and a nearly impossible time growing enough to satisfy the Maestro's demands for tribute, as well.

"No, not the Wastelands. There's hardly any plants there at all, you're right. Even less than in your city, Dystopia. But I came from much farther than that. My family and some of our friends came, in some kind of big, old pre-War car. A 'camper' my father called it. We came a really long way, hundreds of miles, maybe. Or maybe even a thousand. It took us a couple days to get here. We thought maybe we could live in the city, and we asked the Maestro if we could live here. But he said that if my father and all our friends wanted to live in the city, then I had to come to live in his palace with him. My father didn't like it, but what could we do? The Maestro wrecked the car-camper thing we came in, so we couldn't go back. And the Maestro could at least talk, not like the monster back home, so we thought he wouldn't be as bad. Except he was. In fact, he's worse. I wish we'd never come here at all. I'd rather get killed by the monster. At least he kills you quick, and doesn't lock you up and do awful things to you. And there was a lot more to eat. Plants and animals, and berries… all sorts of stuff."

Aster had grown up in a place of ecological catastrophe, made far worse by the Maestros gluttonous actions of eating the best breeding stock of all the animals, crop plants, and starving honey bees to death to satisfy his desire for sweets. The only places with large amounts of plants that she knew of were in the Bronx Zoo, where she had grown up, and within the grounds of the Maestro's palace. Both were maintained by vast amounts of human labor. The idea that there could be a whole, large _place _filled with plants and animals, without their being constantly fed and irrigated was as fantastic as notion to her as if cakes were to start falling from the sky. But perhaps Betty was exaggerating. People told tales, and telling tales was one of the chief forms of entertainment of the Maestro's slaves. So many things about the story that Betty told her were completely contrary to reality.

"How many plants, and animals?" Aster asked… she thought for a moment, then took a clipboard off the door that was used to record whenever food was put into or taken out of the storage room. A pen dangled from it, and Aster took a sheet of paper from the bottom of the clipboard and handed it to Betty 31. "Here. Forget the animals. Just draw me what all the plants look like, how many there are usually around."

Betty took the pen and began sketching. Her skills as an artist were fairly good, however the picture was flat and two dimensional. The concept of perspective in drawing had been forgotten by most people, in the years since the war. She drew stick figures of trees, closer together than any Aster had ever seen, even in the Zoo, and between them, bushes and grass, and small things with leaves and flowers.

It was the drawing of a madwoman, Aster thought. Even though Betty 31 did not seem mad. Aster had no context whatsoever for the picture of what she drew. It was rather as if every single plant in the zoo, or one of the many greenhouses where fruits and vegetables grew in Dystopia, had all been gathered together and planted in one tiny area, no bigger than her house. That was how crowded, the plants were. And the area in the picture, judging by the size of the trees in it, was obviously far bigger than her house. It was madness. Even if you did, for God knows what reason, put so many plants that close together, they couldn't possibly survive for very long after that. Ever since the War, the ground had too much radiation and not enough nutrients. Plus it seldom rained. Plants needed to be kept apart, so that each one would have enough ground to get sufficient nutrition and water.

"That… can't be right." Aster said to Betty 31. "You can't have that many… living… things… so many plants… so close to each other. They'll crowd each other out and starve."

"That's the way things look, back where I came from." Betty insisted.

Madness. It had to be madness. Nothing looked that way. Not since the war. Aster had seen pictures of forests and meadows in Pre-War books, that looked like this, but nothing looked that way now. The world was dead, or dying, everywhere. Even in Dystopia. Wasn't it?

"You came from a place like this, and came here." Aster said, trying to understand exactly what sort of madness had infected Betty 31, and apparently her whole family and friends, as well. What if it were some new form of rabies? Best to learn all she could, so she could be prepared. "Why? Are you fucking nuts? Why would you leave a place like that, and come here?"

"I told you. It was the monster. He kills people, sometimes. We were afraid, and wanted to get away. We thought maybe we'd be safe from him, here. Except the Maestro is worse. There is nowhere safe."

_Theres Iceland, maybe._ Aster thought, but there was no point in raising Betty 31's hopes, or confusing her with talk of a place neither of them had any way of getting to.

"Didn't anyone ever try to kill the monster? Or is he as big and strong as the Maestro?" A crazed, radiation created monster, like the Maestro or the Abominable Creature, except worse, as unimaginable as that might be, would explain the desperation of Betty 31's family to escape to somewhere, anywhere else.

Betty 31 bit her lip, obviously not liking to remember the monster she and her family had fled what sounded like a paradise to escape from. "No, he's not much like the Maestro. He's not big and green. He's not a _Gamma_ like the Maestro. He's white. My father said he was a _vampire_."

"No such thing." Aster said automatically. Vampire books were all in the fiction section, at the Library.

"He's a _vampire._" Betty insisted. "I've seen him. I saw him close once, he knocked me down, when I was outside my house. He's all white, and has red eyes and fangs. My father chased him away with a torch, and that was when we decided to come here, and get away from him. He didn't seem that much bigger than my father, not ten feet tall like the Maestro. Then once, another time, a couple of years ago, I saw him running away, after he bit a woman on her neck. Some men chased him away, and we had to put some moss on her neck to stop the bleeding. But I don't think he was as big as the Maestro then, either. In fact, a couple of the men chasing him were as big as he was. I'm pretty sure. It was hard to tell, it was night time, both times."

"If he's not big like the Maestro, then why haven't the people back there, where you live, killed him?"

"People have _tried!_" Protested Betty 31. "He's not as strong as the Maestro, but he's still pretty strong. And fast. And he hides during the day, someplace we can't find him, and only comes out at night, when it's hard to see to fight him. There's nothing we can do. Even the priest tried, he blessed some water and got some crosses, like some old books said would keep _vampires_ away. We put crosses and blessed water all over our village, but it didn't even help. He kept coming back anyways. Kept attacking people and killing them. We don't know what to do. My grandfather said that the monster sometimes used to talk, back when he was a boy, and the chief or the priest could sometimes get him to go away, but I think my grandfather is just senile. He never talks, all he does is scream, sometimes."

It was insane. A paradise full of plants that couldn't possibly exist, and inhabited by a monster, that also couldn't exist.

Of course, Aster had lived in just such a place for nearly two years now. But that was different. The Maestro was a _Gamma_. Gammas were real, there were others besides the Maestro, such as the Abominable Creature, or a woman spoken about in whispers who was supposedly locked away by the Maestro, still alive, in a coffin no-one had ever seen. Or the skeleton of someone called Leonard Samson, in the Hall of Fallen Heroes.

The Hall of Fallen Heroes. … something clicked in Aster's mind, like the first gear in a combination safe falling into place.

There had been something she had seen, back when she had been made to visit that place, as a child. Something she had thought at the time had not made sense, and when she had gone home and read her story, _The Emporer's New Clothes_, in her old fairytale book, she had been sure it had been a lie. The guard who had told them a terrible story of all the heroes being killed either in the War, or afterwards by the Maestro, had been lying. Aster had thought so, then, and she was nearly certain of it, now. The Hall of Fallen Heroes had been full of skeletons, and other body parts, with one exception. There had been a suit of clothes, tacked to a large board, a suit of clothes that supposedly belonged to a _vampire_. So there must have actually been such things, at least before the War. What had been his name… she couldn't remember… Perhaps Betty 31 knew. She had supposedly seen this _vampire_ fairly recently.

"This monster… this _vampire…_" Aster said to Betty. "You said your grandfather said he used to talk, a long time ago. Did he ever have a name, back then?"

Betty frowned, trying to think. "Something… when we first got here, and heard of him, of the Maestro, I remember thinking that his name sounded like the name my gramps said the _vampire_ had. But not quite the same. It was a 'M' name, though.

Another gear clicked into place, in Aster's brain.

The first letter was enough. She remembered the name that had been on the sign, above the peculiar blue and red suit of shredded, bloodstained clothing.

"Morbius." She said the name aloud.

"Yes, that's it!" Betty 31 seemed surprised. "How did you know? Have you met someone from Milwaukee before?"

_Milwaukee. _The name was familiar. She'd seen it on old Pre-War maps, in some state nearly halfway across the continent. "Is that where you and your family come from? Milwaukee?"

The other woman nodded, but Aster's mind was already racing ahead of her.

A third gear clicked into place in her head.

She'd seen that name, _Morbius, _somewhere else, other than the Hall of Fallen Heroes, far more recently. On the spine and back of an annoyingly incomprehensible book, _Fundamentals of Biochemistry._ It was an unusual name. Were the author of the book and the _vampire _who was terrorizing the people in Milwaukee, and whose clothes hung on a board in the Maestro's palace somehow related?

A fourth gear clicked into place. Or perhaps, not even two _related_ men. Maybe, just maybe, the _same _man. After all, the Maestro had once been a man, and had been _turned_ into the huge green thing he was now. Maybe the author of the book had been _turned_ into a vampire. It was actually more likely than being turned into a Gamma, the way Aster saw it. After all, according to the books about vampires, which maybe were not all fiction after all, if you got bitten by a vampire (or killed by one, the books disagreed on that point), you turned into one.

Whatever it was, whoever it was, it was interesting. Brilliant, almost. But the Maestro either thought that Morbius was dead, in which case Aster didn't really care for him to know anything he was unaware of, or else knew he was alive, in which case he wanted _other _people to believe that the _vampire_ was dead, and Aster didn't really care to put herself in danger by letting the green monster know that she knew things that he didn't want her (or anyone else) to know. She had to remain silent about what she knew. And keep Betty 31 silent, as well.

"Listen to me." She said to the other woman. "You can't ever tell the Maestro about the _vampire. _He'd be absolutely furious, if he knew."

Betty 31 looked puzzled. "Why? The _vampire's_ back in Wisconsin. It's so far away. Why should the Maestro get angry?"

"Does he _need _a reason to get angry?"

That made Betty 31 shudder. She thought about what the Maestro had done with the blimp, torturing the Betty's foolish enough to get onto it for no reason at all. "No… I guess not. You're right."

"The people you came with can't ever tell him, either. Or anyone. He'd probably kill them, if they talked about it." Aster warned her. "Do you have a way to get some sort of message to them?"

"Maybe." Said Betty. "The priest back home taught me and the other children to read and write. I've been able to send and get a few letters from my family since I was brought to the Maestro's palace. There's a guard who likes me, and sometimes does me favors like delivering them."

Aster didn't ask _why _the guard, whoever he was, liked Betty 31, or was willing to do such favors. She could guess well enough, and didn't need to hear the details.

"Is there a way you can tell them in a letter not to ever talk to anyone else about where they came from, that only they will understand? Not to talk about the_ vampire_? Or how so many plants grew, back where you came from."

"I think so." Said Betty, hesitantly. "Maybe talking about some things that happened in our family a while back. They'd be the only ones to understand it.

Aster nodded in relief. If the _vampire _was not a good thing to let the Maestro know about, then letting him know about the plants was even worse. If Betty was actually right, about what she had said regarding how so many plants and animals existed in and around Milwaukee (and HOW they survived and thrived in the Post-War world was something Aster had no clue as of yet), then the last thing Aster wanted to do was to let the Maestro know that such a place existed. The green monster had been destroying the plant and animal life in and around Dystopia for decades, due to his unwise, appetite ruled decisions. The island of life Betty 31 claimed to have come from might be the last such place left in all of what used to be North America. Maybe the last such place in the world. Except for maybe Iceland. But regardless of what might be going on in some small island halfway across the Atlantic Ocean, there was no way Aster was going to let the Maestro know about some tiny, miraculous island of life on the same continent he was on, so that once he finished destroying Dystopia, he could go there and destroy _it_ as well.

And he would destroy it, if he knew about it. Aster was certain of that. The Maestro destroyed everything he touched. He had spent his entire life, even as a human, devoted to destruction. And she doubted that either the people who still lived in Milwaukee, or even the _vampire _Morbius (or whoever the hell he was) would stop the Maestro from taking and destroying whatever he wanted, when he wanted it. From eating his way through the place, the way he was eating his way through Dystopia. She'd been raised to be a zookeeper, to be a steward of life. If this miraculous little island of life that Betty 31 said she came from had somehow really survived the War, or somehow appeared afterwards, Aster could never betray it to the Maestro. Not even if she had to die to keep the secret.

Not even, she thought with cold pragmatism, if Betty 31 had to die as well, to keep it. But it most likely wouldn't come to that. The thought that the Maestro would be furious if he heard any mention of a _vampire_ or anything else that existed back where the other woman had come from would ensure her silence.

"We need to go back," Aster said to Betty. "Someone might wonder, if we're gone too long, and we'll be punished. We'll wait in that dining area and listen at the door until the Maestro's done playing with that stupid blimp, before we go out. Try to act normal. But when we get back, I might have some more questions for you. Go to your bed as soon as you can when you get back. I'll meet you there later in the night."

Betty 31 nodded, and they went back up to the deck of the ship. As it turned out, it seemed that the Maestro had been satisfied with playing with just the first group of women he had tricked into getting onto the blimp. The rest of the trip went by in a blur, Aster eager for the very first time in her life to get to the Maestro's palace.

The cruise ship, _The Green Fantasy_, did not return to land until nearly midnight. Things were chaotic, of course. Some of the women and crew had had supper on the ship, and wanted to go to bed. Some hadn't eaten due to seasickness or the excitement of the trip, and now were hungry and demanded that supper be served despite the late hour. Still others wanted to extend the revelry of the sea voyage onto land, and dashed about excitedly here and there in the palace, enjoying drink, drugs, and sex.

Aster took advantage of the convenient chaos to make her way, unnoticed, to the Hall of Fallen Heroes. Or nearly unnoticed. Daniel Wolfkiller had not been on the ocean cruise, but knew that Aster had. He made it a point to watch the girl, without her noticing him watching, just as she made it a point to watch the Maestro, without him noticing it, either. Aster would probably have been hysterically amused by the mathematical recursion of the situation, if she had been aware of it, but the stablemaster's sense of humor, what little of it there was, tended towards the more blunt and obvious.

But regardless of his lack of a finely developed sense of humor, Wolfkiller had a finely developed sense of observation. He was far older than Aster and far more experienced at hunting. So he recognized the quick, excited motions with which Aster moved, as soon as she thought she was away from the crowd that had come off the boat with her. It was the body language of a predator, that had gotten wind of some strong scent of blood, or something else of extreme interest, and was determined to track it down.

_Something's got her wind up. _Wolfkiller thought. _She found out something __**very **__interesting on that boat. Or thought she did. I don't know what it was, but I __**do**__ know that her main interest for years has been finding a way to kill that bastard. I've made damn sure of that._

He did not dare take Aster off whatever scent she was following, by trying to see where she was going. If she found out something interesting, he would find a way to learn it later. For now, he let her follow her own head, and went back into the small cottage by the stables where he lived.

Aster, for her part, had not noticed Daniel Wolfkiller in the midst of the rest of the crowd. So far as she knew, once she slipped out of the crowd, she was alone and unsuspected. When she got to the Hall of Fallen Heroes, it was empty, without even a guard. The Maestro considered the artifacts of no value, except to terrify the human citizens of Dystopia. Nor did he consider the files of information about the dead heroes to have any value, either, except as a further means of creating terror. It was, perhaps, a reasonable assumption on his part.

To most people, strength was power. And all the strength of the Heroes, all their power, had not saved them from either the War, or the Maestro.

To the Maestro, strength was power. And he was the strongest one there was.

To Aster, knowledge was power.

After entering the Hall of Fallen Heroes, Aster did nothing for several seconds. She cocked her head and listened carefully, making sure that she didn't hear the footsteps of anyone else coming down the corridor towards her.

Then she made her way to the file cabinet below the suit of red and blue clothes that said '_Morbius The Living Vampire' _above them. She wasn't sure how the files were organized, she had never actually read them before. It was a failure on her part which she now could have kicked herself for. But dwelling on past mistakes wouldn't help her. From her experience at the library that she had frequented so often, back before she had become the Maestro's slave, it seemed reasonable that the files would be organized either in order of the relevance of the information, or in chronological order. She slid the drawer open slightly, and breathing heavily in excitement, took a sheaf of papers about half an inch thick out from the very front, and then sat down behind a large platform with a skeleton on it, well hidden from the hallway, and began to read.

Her face was flushed, and her heart beat so loudly that she was sure that the Maestro could hear it from anywhere in the palace. She read anyways. Reading was an addiction with her, far more ingrained and intense than codeine had ever been. And other than the medical books she only very occasionally dared 'borrow' from Doctor Llewellyn's shelves, it had been a very long time before she had gotten a pure, mainlined fix of print.

The story she read on the first few pages made Aster, despite all the horrors she had been through, nearly sob with pity. Her intuition on the boat had actually been correct. The biochemist, Michael Morbius, who had written the inscrutable book, _Fundamentals of Biochemistry, _had, in fact, actually been _turned_, into a vampire. Or perhaps _vampire_ was not the right word for whatever it was he had become. He hadn't been bitten or killed by a _vampire_ such as occurred in the books about such creatures, but instead had been transformed into a _vampire_ (or whatever the hell it was that he was) by some sort of poorly thought out cure for a blood disease that he had, which involved injecting himself with blood from a vampire bat and giving himself electric shocks.

The procedure didn't sound like a very good idea to Aster, it actually sounded about as ludicrous as the notion that some of the oriental people in Dystopia had regarding the magical curative properties of tiger testicles and other assorted animal body parts. But she was hardly a Nobel Prize Winning biochemist, so what did she know? Maybe it was actually a brilliant idea, to those with Michael Morbius's education, but the results were not so brilliant. His disease had not been cured. Instead, his results had been more like something Aster's father would have described as a 'dirty trick on nature'. Rather than curing his blood disease, whatever Michael Morbius had done, had done an end-run around the problem, and enabled him to live, despite his blood problem, by giving him the ability to replace his own failed blood supply with that of others. By drinking it.

His 'cure' had turned him into something very much resembling a _vampire_ in terms of appearance, strength, abilities, and diet, but Aster was hardly fooled. Creatures with different origins might look and act superficially similar, but if you looked at them closely, would have all sorts of fundamental differences. The shark and the dolphin were good examples. One had evolved as a primitive fish. The other had evolved from mammals. Regular _vampires _were made by being bitten by another _vampire. _Morbius had become whatever he was due to some kind of mad scientist experiment he had done on himself. _Vampire _maybe was the only convenient word in the English language by which to call him, but to think he was more than superficially similar to ordinary _vampires _was bullshit.

She read on a few more pages. It got worse. Morbius's _vampiric_ (for lack of a better word) necessity to drink the blood of others would, if not satisfied, cause a craving and an agony that gradually increased in intensity, until he lost complete control of his rational faculties, and would attack the nearest person to drink their blood. Often, someone who had been his friend. Often, they died.

The man, or the _vampire, _was a killer. Like the Maestro.

No, not like the Maestro. More like a rabid dog. He had little control or choice over the matter. Especially since, despite the man's brilliance, his reaction to his condition seemed to be perversely the opposite of what it ought to have been. It was rather like the difference between intelligence and wisdom her father had told her about. Like the Maestro, he had plenty of the former, but perhaps not so much of the latter. Morbius, like the Maestro was brilliant enough to figure out _how_ to do what he wanted to do (except apparently curing his disease in a proper fashion), but also like the Maestro, not quite so good at knowing _what _he should be doing. Or maybe not. The Maestro had spent his life building weapons to kill people with. Morbius had been a doctor, and spent his life helping people. His perverse foolishness seemed to focus entirely on the ass-backwards way in which he dealt with his _vampiric _condition.

"Poor damned bastard." Aster muttered to herself. The whole situation seemed like some sort of a cosmic farce to her. The fucking Maestro had spent his whole life finding ways to kill people, and had ended up pretty much winning the lottery when it came to transformations. He had the strongest body in the world, when he wanted, and could turn back into a normal person when he wanted. He could have been anything. Done anything. And what did he do with such fantastic luck? Raped and killed people and destroyed everything around him. Meanwhile the poor bastard she was reading about devoted his life to saving lives, and what happened to him? He ended up what had to be some sort of cosmic sick joke of a booby prize, a body with a _vampiric _condition that forced him to attack and kill people.

She touched a photograph on one of the pages, of Morbius back when he had been human. It was the same picture that was on the back of _Fundamentals of Biochemistry._

"Poor damned bastard." She said again. "It's sick, and unfair what happened to you. You should be what _he_ is."

There were several more photographs. Aster took one, of Morbius, after his transformation into a _vampire_, and folded it carefully. She was going to show it to Betty 31 just to confirm if this was the _vampire _that she had seen, back in Milwaukee, but Aster was almost certain that it was. Everything fit what the other woman had told her, including the fact that crosses and blessed water had no effect on him.

Carefully, she put the rest of the papers in her hand back into the drawer, in the proper order. There was far more to read, and it would probably take her several weeks of sneaking around to get through it all. But she was fairly sure that there had to be something of extreme interest in the files. _Someone _had gone to fairy great lengths to give everyone the impression that Morbius was dead. People didn't do something like that for no reason. There had to be a reason. She didn't know if it was the Maestro deliberately lying, because he didn't want anyone else to know that Morbius was alive, or if it was the old man from the rebellion several years ago, Rick Jones, not wanting the Maestro to know that Morbius was alive.

But either way, whether the Maestro didn't want others to know, or Rick Jones didn't want the Maestro to know, the conclusion was the same. Except for children playing games, people didn't lie and keep secrets for no reason, or silly reasons. They kept them out of _fear._

Gears that had been clicking in Aster's brain all the time she read the few pages on Morbius settled into their final positions, and the door to a riddle opened wide. Revealing answers, but also far more questions. Her eyes gleamed fiercely. The eyes of a predator, and the eyes of an addict, mainlining cognition, hatred, and revenge.

_There has to be __**something**__ about Morbius for the Maestro to be afraid of. Something that's dangerous to the Maestro. _Aster thought. _I don't know what, but I'm going to find out. There's hundreds of pages in his files. It has to be in there, somewhere. I'm going to find out what it is about Morbius that's dangerous. Then I'm going to find __**him**__.__I'll get to Wisconsin, somehow, and find him. Because he's still alive. I'm sure of it._

_**Morbius the Living Vampire is still ALIVE!**_


	14. Chapter 14

Chapter 14. Multiplication

The same night Aster had put together several puzzle pieces from things she had seen and heard, Betty 31 did indeed confirm that the picture of Morbius the Living Vampire was, in fact, the same _vampire_ that had been terrorizing the survivors in the city of Milwaukee, where she had come from. Except, Betty 31 said, he was a lot thinner. Not surprising. From what the woman had to say about Morbius, that he screamed all the time, it sounded like he was completely out of his mind. The insane generally suffered from poor health, unless they were taken care of by others. In Dystopia, only the very wealthy could afford to care for mentally dysfunctional relatives, and the people in Milwaukee were hardly going to try to preserve the health of a monster that they wanted dead.

The latter goal, Aster decided after several weeks of reading the files on Morbius a few pages at a time, was probably a very grave error. One thing she found puzzling about Betty 31's story, is that she claimed that neither she nor any of her relatives had suffered from radiation poisoning (Aster described the usual symptoms to her) on, or immediately after, their trip from Milwaukee to Dystopia. However, some of them, when venturing too far away into the Outside to scavenge metal, had come down with mild cases of it since then. Unlike Aster, they didn't know what an electroscope was, so had no way of avoiding areas of high radiation levels.

But the level of radiation was even higher, beyond the Outside where the unfortunate dirt farmers lived. Betty 31 and her family should have gotten very sick, even from a few day trip. Yet she said they were fine. Or at least as 'fine' as you could describe a family that was living under the tyranny of the Maestro and had been forced to give up one of their daughter's as a sex toy to him. How could that be? Aster dismissed the notion that maybe the radiation levels had gone down to normal levels in the century following the War. People were still getting sick and dying of radiation poisoning all the time.

Probably there was little or no radiation in Milwaukee, if what Betty31 had said about all the plant life there was accurate. Most likely it was, Aster finally decided, regardless of how improbable a miracle it seemed in the Post War world. Top niche predators like the _vampire _needed a fairly large and complex food chain to support their presence. Morbius was still alive, and had to feed on human blood. That meant, a fairly large human population was needed to supply that blood. Which, in turn meant that a lot of smaller animals and plants were needed to keep the humans alive.

Aster considered the possibility that perhaps, out of sheer luck, Milwaukee and the nearby areas had never been hit by nuclear bombs during the War. However, when she questioned Betty 31 about it, the woman described destroyed buildings and the remains of fallen and burned trees. The city had been nuked. It had somehow recovered since to something resembling the Pre-War world. And whatever had made it recover had apparently done so fairly quickly, as Betty 31 said that according to her grandfather, there had been just as many plants and trees when he had been a boy (back when the _vampire, _Morbius, still retained sufficient sanity to talk sometimes) as there were now.

After getting through most of the file about Morbius during several months of carefully stolen moments, and learning about the things that had happened to him, and perhaps more importantly, the things he had _done_, the abilities he had displayed at different times after his transformation from a human biochemist into a _vampire_, Aster finally had a theory of sorts which explained the facts regarding the abundance of life (according to Betty 31) in and around the old city of Milwaukee, and the strange (albeit temporary) immunity of the woman and her fellow refugees to the high levels of radiation they were undoubtedly exposed to during their panicked (and ill advised in Aster's opinion) trip through dead, radioactive lands.

_The vampire is killing some of the people over there in Wisconsin, certainly. _Aster thought to herself after running one scenario after another through her head, and being left with only one theory that fit the facts. _But their attempts to kill him are a very bad mistake on their part, and they are lucky they have not succeeded. Because if what I think is true, and I don't see any other explanation, then the vampire is __**also **__keeping them and everything else in Milwaukee alive._

Of course, what Betty 31 had told Aster, about the _vampire_ being far thinner than he had been in the picture of him that Aster had stolen (and subsequently returned) from the files about him in the Hall of Fallen Heroes was extremely worrisome for several reasons. The picture in the file showed a _vampire_ that was already fairly lean. If Morbius were a 'lot thinner' than that, he was probably literally starving. A starving animal, despite what some fools thought, was not a good hunter. A starving animal was a _weak _animal, and a weak animal was not good at hunting. Nor was it good at escaping anything that might hunt _it. _Aster recalled what Betty 31 had said about the people in Milwaukee trying to kill Morbius. Very likely, if he grew weak enough, they might succeed.

_Bad, very bad. _Aster thought. She was certain the _vampire _was keeping the humans, and everything else, in Milwaukee alive. But the people there didn't know that. All they knew is that he was attacking them, drinking their blood, and sometimes killing them. Very likely, since it sounded like Morbius was out of his mind, the _vampire _didn't realize it himself. The first clue anyone over there would probably have of what was going on would be if they succeeded in killing Morbius (which was probably inevitable in the near future, if he remained insane and kept getting weaker), and found out that everything around them started to die afterwards.

It got worse. The story told in the files was both extraordinary, and tragic. After becoming a _vampire, Morbius _had done both incredible and dreadful things. The latter was particularly tragic, given that it seemed to Aster that most of the terrible things he had done were probably unnecessary, and caused by both the former biochemist, and various other people who had lived before the war operating off the same basic mistaken premise. An understandable premise, but a dreadfully mistaken one nonetheless.

Reading the files also showed her what it was about Morbius that was potentially dangerous to the Maestro. But the word, _potentially, _of course, reminded her of an old joke, that she had heard the men who worked at the zoo sometimes tell each other. The joke had different variations, but always the same punch line, with someone concluding: _**Potentially**__, we could have three million new-dollars. But in __**actuality **__what we really have on our hands are two sluts and a queer._

Which was much what Aster had on her hands.

_Potentially _she had a _vampire_ who was keeping a whole ecosystem alive without even knowing (at least consciously) that he was doing so, and could probably spread the area of life if he _did_ know what he was doing, and also had just the right combination of abilities that could, _potentially, _under exactly the right circumstances, prove lethal to the Maestro.

In _actuality _what she had on her hands was being locked up as a sex toy in the Maestro's palace with no way to escape, and a starving, deranged _vampire _about 1000 miles away (across land with very high radiation levels) who was surrounded by numerous people who wanted to kill him, and she had no way of reaching the place to tell the people to stop trying to kill him, or of attempting to return the _vampire_ to sanity, or whether such an attempt would even work.

_Besides which, _Aster thought with a sigh one night, as she re-read a few particular pages that she had read several times before. _Even if I get to him, getting him to do what I want may cost far more than I or anyone else is able or willing to do._

She looked at the two pictures of Michael Morbius, the one of him as a human, and the one of him as a _vampire. _Had she thought before that he should have become what the Maestro had? That he would have been better off that way?

_No, _she concluded looking at the picture. As someone else in the files, deranged, but brilliant, had concluded, he was actually just _perfect _the way he was. After all, he was a _**Living**__ vampire. _Perhaps her wish to use him as the perfect weapon, to kill the Maestro, was selfishness. Far more important was probably keeping him alive. So he could keep everything in Milwaukee alive. It was, after all, the last little island of life in the entire continent. One of the last few in the world, probably. Though she had no idea what the rest of the world was like.

_And what if the Maestro finds that place? Which he most likely will, sooner or later. When he eats his way through the last of what's left here, he's going to be looking for someplace else. And though Morbius has the potential to kill him, a weakened, insane vampire is hardly going to last more than a second against that bloody green brute._

Several scenarios went through Aster's mind in a few seconds, and she sighed. She needed to get to Wisconsin to protect Morbius. And it was not just herself she had to somehow get there. She would need help. There was no way for her to do what needed to be done on her own. And, being on the autistic side of the human psychological spectrum, Aster was not very adept at being socially persuasive. And even if she were, there was still that little nagging problem. That what ultimately needed to be done would very likely would cost far more than she or anyone else was able or willing to do. And very possibly, more than Morbius would be able or willing to do, as well. The vampire was the perfect weapon, but a fragile and dangerous one. Using him as a weapon would be rather like using one of those Japanese swords, while it was heated to a few thousand degrees. It would cut through almost anything, but simply picking it up would badly burn you, and if you didn't use it in just the right way, the sword itself would shatter.

Still, that particular problem was far in the future. It would be a while, yet, before Dystopia was so dead that the Maestro needed to find a new place to live. Best to concentrate on the first problem at hand. How to get out of the palace. Because she had no clue as to how she would do that.

Aster spent other stolen moments in the next several months re-reading bits and pieces of Morbius's file, and trying to find a way to escape the palace. The former was interesting, and she wished there were a way she could steal the whole file en-mass and study it at her leisure. But that was impossible, as was escape from the palace. The doors were always guarded, and even if she had found a way out, the Maestro would track her down with his Wardogs and probably have them rip her to pieces. Or rape her first, then (assuming she survived that) have the Wardogs rip her to pieces afterwards.

She grew taller, and although when she had first come to the palace she had been the shortest female slave that the Maestro had, by the time she was nearly 17, she was taller than most of them. And likely to get taller, still. Aster was by no means, physically an adult. Her breasts, although larger than the nubs they had been at 14, were still fairly small. Nor had she started menstruating yet.

It was around this time that Betty 31, the woman who had told Aster about Morbius's survival, suddenly changed from being depressed and fearful the way Aster had seen her on the cruise ship _The Green Fantasy_, to being strangely buoyant and excited. This worried Aster. Such a drastic change in personality could , in fact, very likely did, mean that the older woman had lost her sanity. That was not a good thing. Aster had managed to frighten Betty 31 into keeping silent about the existence of the _vampire_ and all the plant life where she had come from, by telling her that the Maestro would be infuriated by the mere mention of such things. But an insane person often didn't have enough good sense to be frightened or to keep silent when they should. Aster knew all about that. She certainly hadn't had enough sense years ago to know enough to conceal her intelligence from the Maestro.

Not sure what to do about the sudden change in Betty 31's mood, Aster finally decided to confront her with it directly. She stole a couple cookies from the kitchen one day, and brought them over to Betty 31's bed that evening.

"Look what I brought you!" Aster said, setting the treats next to the pillow.

"Oh! Thank you! I've been starving lately!" Betty began munching on the treats, and Aster regarded the way she looked. She seemed to have gained weight, in the months since Aster had spoken with her in the food storage room on _The Green Fantasy._ Perhaps that explained her cheerfulness. Perhaps she had found a guard who was slipping her extra food in return for occasional sexual favors. Extra food didn't seem like a very good reason to Aster to be as happy and bouncing as Betty 31 was, when she was a slave and sex toy to a monster, but perhaps it was a good enough reason by the other woman's way of thinking.

Still, she needed to be sure it was the food, and not insanity.

_Please, please let it not be insanity._ Aster prayed to whatever gods there were that listened to prayers from people in such wretched circumstances as hers. She wasn't sure what she would do if it were insanity. She couldn't, she simply couldn't let Betty 31 run around insane, and possibly blabbering about the _vampire_ and all the plants and animals where she had come from, but Aster wasn't sure she was coldblooded enough to kill the woman to keep her quiet. In fact, she was actually fairly sure that she probably couldn't do anything that horrible. She didn't know what she would do. Perhaps if Betty 31 blabbed because she was insane, Aster could somehow convince the Maestro that everything she said was merely the ravings of a madwoman and had no basis in reality.

She waited while Betty 31 munched a few bites of cookie.

"You seem happier lately." Aster said cautiously. "Have things gotten better for you, here?"

"Oh, yes!" Betty 31 said brightly, worrying Aster. Things never got better in the Maestro's palace for his slaves. They only got worse. _He_ only got worse. It was insanity, it had to be, to think otherwise. Still, she had to be sure.

"How have they gotten better?" Aster asked. "You look like you've gained a little weight. Is one of the guards getting you more food."

"Yes, I have gained weight, haven't I?" Betty 31 looked down at her slightly plump stomach and smiled. "I'm going to be queen! I'm going to have _his _baby, and afterwards, my family will come here and live with me in the palace, and I'll be queen."

It was insanity, but it was not the sort Aster had feared. It was worse.

"You're telling me that you're pregnant? With the Maestro's baby? How did that happen?" It was difficult for the monster to get any of his slaves pregnant, which was perhaps a small mercy. He ripped them up inside too much by the mere sex act.

"The Maestro asked me. He said I looked a lot like the first Betty, the one who was his wife, and wanted me to have his son for him. He said if I did it, I would be queen, and my family could all come live with me here at the palace. So I said yes. He got Doctor Llewellyn to do it."

For a moment the involvement of the Doctor didn't make sense to Aster. If Betty 31 was pregnant with the Maestro's child, then what was she doing having sex with the physician. Then things clicked into place. Since the injuries he caused women made it almost impossible for them to get pregnant, the Maestro had resorted to other means, the same means often used at the zoo, to try to produce an heir for himself. Or rather, to try and produce a new sort of toy for himself.

"Artificial insemination?" She said to Betty 31.

"Yes!" The older woman nodded enthusiastically. "That's what the doctor called it. It was a month ago, and it worked. I've been so hungry, though. I guess the little baby inside me needs a lot of food. Like him."

Aster backed away, horror on her face.

"What's wrong?" said Betty 31. "Are you alright."

"I… I feel sick. I think I need some of my codeine." She hadn't taken the codeine in years, but everyone else thought she still was. "I'm really happy for you, though."

It was a lie, but there would have been no point in telling the woman the truth. Aster made her way to her bed. Perhaps it was only partly a lie. She _did _feel sick. She wasn't looking at an insane woman, but a dead one. The poor stupid fool, the Maestro had taken advantage of the fact that she had come from another place, far away from Dystopia, and didn't know enough about the Maestro, not about his body and not about his mind, to know not to agree to what she had.

_Oh, Betty, you poor, stupid fool. _Aster thought. _Why did you believe his promises? Do you really think he means to make you a queen? Why didn't you ask me, before you agreed? I would have told you to say 'No'. Though likely he would have forced it on you anyways. Maybe you're better off this way, being happy for a few months, believing you're going to be a queen and see your family again. But oh, poor Betty. There is simply no way for us poor, frail, merely human women to carry a child of __**his**_ _to term. There is no way for us to even __**survive**__ such a thing._

Aster did not sleep well that night. As things stood, Betty 31 was going to die within a few months. Aster wasn't sure how long, she had read about the development of human embryos and fetuses in some of the books she had borrowed over the past few years from Doctor Llewellyn's shelves, but the development of an essentially human baby did not necessarily have anything to do with the development of a gamma baby. It could take 9 months, or more time or less time. Aster had no way of knowing. The longer it took to develop, the longer Betty 31 would have to live. But it wasn't going to be very much longer. Not unless Aster did something.

And that was the maddening part. At this early point, there were things that Aster could do, to save Betty 31's life. She knew of herbs sold in the market in Dystopia that would induce a miscarriage. She could tell the pregnant woman to have the guard she was 'friendly' with to get some of them. It was not too late. Betty 31 had done Aster a great favor by telling her what was happening in Wisconsin, by letting her know that life still survived. That Morbius the Living Vampire still survived. Now Aster could return the favor. She could use her knowledge to save the other woman's life.

She could… but after several hours of thought, sitting in the dark and cold in a chair near one of the barred windows, Aster made a cold blooded decision not to. She felt guilty and ashamed, as she made a deliberate decision to let the other woman die. She had been raised to be a zookeeper, a steward of life, and surely that meant human life as well as that of the zoo animals. But….

There was her own life to think of. Perhaps if Betty 31 had been just a little bit smarter… a little bit stronger… a little bit less foolish, Aster might decided to do something. Or she might not have. She wasn't sure. Perhaps she was simply trying to justify things to herself. But Betty 31 simply did too many foolish things. Her affair with the guard was foolish, done as it was without the knowledge and consent of the Maestro. Her agreement to carry the child of the Maestro, who anyone with eyes could see was five times the size, and God only knew how much stronger than a normal man, was foolish. In fact, her decision to leave a paradise of plants and animals because it contained one single _vampire _who was not nearly as bad as the Maestro, was foolish. And Betty 31's foolishness made her weak, and her weakness made her _dangerous._

No, it was far safer and more convenient to Aster to let her die. If she were dead, she would not talk (whether out of foolishness or out of fear) to the Maestro about such things as an island of life around the old city of Milwaukee, or the _vampire _that lived there. And saving her life would be dangerous for Aster. If the Maestro were to find out that Aster had given the woman herbs to miscarry his unborn child, he would simply kill Aster out of hand, in some painful and humiliating way. And Betty 31's foolishness made it all too likely that the Maestro would somehow find out.

Besides which, for all Aster knew, if did save Betty 31's life with abortifacient herbs, for all she knew, it would only be temporary. Very likely it _would _be temporary, Aster told herself, knowing as she did so that she was simply looking for justifications for her coldblooded decision to assuage her guilt. But if the woman miscarried the child she was pregnant with now, the Maestro would likely just try again.

Or so Aster told herself. But she was far too intellectually honest to completely avoid the real truth, or the guilt that it gave her, that she was choosing her own survival at the cost of the other woman's death. Probably a death of extreme pain.

Aster lived with the guilt over the next few months, trying without success to salve her conscience by giving Betty 31 all the best treats that she was able to steal from the kitchen, and listening patiently, disguising her sadness, when the woman told her about how happy she was going to be when she was Queen, and her family came to the palace to live with her.

The fantasies Betty 31 had about how wonderful things would be as the Maestro's Queen made Aster sad, as well as guilty. It reminded Aster of the books about fairytales she had read so long ago. Or perhaps it had not been so long ago, she had been 14 years old when the Maestro had taken her away from her home, and right now she was not quite 17 years old yet. She'd only been a slave for a little under three years, and even at 14 years old, she had still liked borrowing the fairy tale books from Thumb and reading them every now and then. But back at the zoo had been another life. She was older now, and after enduring that horrible night with the Maestro, and the several rapes by Paul Rasse and his gang of sadistic guards since then, she was older in other, different ways, than she would have been if she had still been living with her father at the zoo.

In a way, it seemed like she was older than Betty 31, even though the other woman was actually 25, or 9 years older than Aster. But what the other woman said about being Queen reminded Aster of a naïve child. There were no fairy tales, or queens. And Aster would have far rather slept in a cage full of dirty straw with a bunch of zoo animals than to sleep in a velvet and silk bed with the Maestro, or sit next to him on a throne and be his 'Queen'. Not that Betty would even live to be 'Queen' anyways.

The maddening part, that made Aster feel even worse than her guilt already did, was that Betty 31's death was probably utterly pointless. Probably pointless, because if it was impossible for a frail, merely human woman to survive carrying a child of a monstrous creature like the Maestro's, it was for the same reason highly improbable that she would live long enough that the child inside her would develop to the point of viability. Even the Maestro had certain weaknesses. One of them which Aster had noticed almost immediately, after she began specifically looking for them, was that he had to breath. He needed oxygen. And a fetus that was too young, even a gamma fetus, would not have lungs developed well enough to breath on it's own. If the pregnancy killed Betty 31 too quickly, the child inside her was doomed as well. Aster recalled the time, long ago, when she had seen the Maestro transformed into a normal, human form. She didn't know if a child of his would or could develop in a normal human form. Probably not. The only way it would do so would be if it didn't inherit the abilities of the Maestro at all, in which case the Maestro would probably simply reject it and try again. If it did have the Maestro's abilities, it would kill the mother. That was inevitable.

_Of course, maybe the child could inherit the Maestro's abilities but not manifest them until it gets older. Or at least until after it's born. That would be nice. _Aster thought once, when she was in a particular sour mood. _Having pastries fall from the sky would be nice, too. Or having the New Icelandic Army show up in the harbor tomorrow, with weapons full of some sort of toxic gas that's lethal to the Maestro and nobody else. All those things would be nice. But I'm not going to count on them happening._

Around this time, Aster stopped borrowing books from Dr. Llewellyn's shelf. She had read most of them, or at least most of them that she could understand. A few of them, like the wretched _Fundamentals of Biochemistry _remained far beyond her present level of understanding, and maddeningly absent from the Doctor's medical library were the intermediate books that probably must have been available to pre-War medical students in the past, that would allow her to fill in the huge gaps in her knowledge sufficiently that the advanced books would become understandable to her.

She still went to his hospital periodically to fill her bottle of codeine (which she still promptly threw out while trying hard not to think of the happy dreams it could give her), but Betty 31's pregnancy with the Maestro's child had caused Aster to become very wary of the physician. The pregnancy was due to artificial insemination. The Maestro apparently was smart enough to grasp that ripping a woman up inside by having sex with her would probably damage her so badly that she would not be able to get pregnant, though not smart enough to grasp that a merely human woman probably couldn't carry a child of his long enough that it would survive. And it occurred to Aster, one day, that the only person in the palace that she knew of who had the equipment and skills to carry out the artificial insemination procedure was Doctor Llewellyn.

Probably the Doctor had very little choice in the matter. Certainly he must have known that he was signing Betty 31's death warrant, but if he had refused, the Maestro simply would have killed him, and found another doctor who would carry out the procedure. But Aster still didn't like it, and it helped to alleviate some of her guilt at her deliberate decision to let Betty 31 die to place the blame for it on Doctor Llewellyn instead of herself. Perhaps Doctor Llewellyn even knew why Aster now left his hospital in much more of a hurry than she had previously, because he seemed to have a drawn, sad look about his face. Or perhaps that was just age catching up with him. Aster did not trust the sad look. If he were so sad as all that, then he could have refused to perform the procedure on Betty 31 that was going to result in her death. He would have been killed himself, but then he wouldn't have been so sad.

During the few months when Aster tried to assuage her conscience regarding her decision to let Betty 31 die, it seemed to her that the woman's stomach grew larger, faster, than it would have with an ordinary pregnancy. Aster didn't know what to conclude from that. It could mean that the fetus, being a gamma, was simply larger at any given stage of development than an ordinary human fetus would have been. It could mean that the fetus was developing faster. Or both, or neither. There was no information in any of Doctor Llewellyn's books that Aster had seen about gamma pregnancies. The Maestro actually seemed rather concerned about Betty 31 during this time and let the woman rest in bed whenever she wanted, and frequently brought her up to Doctor Llewellyn's hospital for checkups. Aster wasn't entirely sure what the doctor would know, if anything, about Gamma pregnancies, either, but despite her anger at his performing the procedure that had doomed Betty 31, she wasn't going to endanger him (or more importantly, herself) by bringing up the question.


	15. Chapter 15

Chapter 15. Division.

It was almost 4 months after Aster learned that Betty 31 was pregnant with the Maestro's child that she was woken up in the middle of the night by one of the guards roughly shaking her.

"You! Zookeeper! Get up! Now!"

Aster jumped. She didn't know what was wrong, what she had done. Had the Maestro somehow found out about the plants in Wisconsin, or worse yet, the survival of Morbius, and learned that Aster also knew and had not told him? Had he found out about any of the other things she had done, that she probably shouldn't have, such as reading Doctor Llewellyn's books, studying him for weaknesses, listening to the guard's conversations, or stealing food from the kitchen?

Her heard began pounding in her chest. Aster reached for a green bathrobe that was on her dresser, as she was wearing nothing else but a green silk negligee that covered even less than the tunic styled dress that she wore during the day. She actually would have preferred sleeping nude, as she found the negligee uncomfortable in bed, but the other women all wore it at night, and she did not want to attract attention to herself.

"Never mind that!" The guard seized her roughly by the arm and literally yanked her out of bed, causing her toes to bang painfully against the hard floor. "Get up! You come with me! NOW!"

This could not be good. Anything that demanded her immediate presence without even allowing her to put on a bathrobe had to be very bad. She didn't know what she had done, but she was certain the Maestro was going to do something horrible to her. She was afraid to go with the guard, and afraid to run away. Probably if she ran away, the Maestro would do something far worse to her than whatever it was he already had in mind. She went with the guard. Maybe she could find a way to kill herself before the Maestro did.

The guard half dragged her, half let her run behind him, all the way to the Maestro's throne room. When they got there, Aster saw that the reason she had been brought was not because she was in trouble. Or perhaps she was in worse trouble than she had anticipated. The usual favored members of the Maestro's court, who generally were indulging themselves either with food or with sex were either absent, or cowering near the wall in obvious fear. In the center of the room, several feet in front of the Maestro's throne, Betty 31 was lying on the green tiled floor in a pool of blood, moaning in agony. Half her swollen abdomen was covered with an irregular purple and black bruise. The woman's back was bent at an odd angle, her legs were limp. The smell of urine and feces filled the room.

_Spine broken. Paralysis. _ Aster's mind analysed the injury automatically. Probably the _Gamma_ fetus had done it. She felt sick.

The guard gave Aster a violent shove, towards the prostate, pregnant woman. "She's here!" He said to the Maestro.

The green tyrant gave Aster a terrible glare. "Help her!" It was not a request to be refused.

Aster looked around in bewilderment at all the frightened people, then at the Maestro, then down at Betty 31. It was obvious what was happening. It was what Aster had known for the past 4 months was going to happen. A gamma fetus was simply too large and strong for a human woman to carry inside her. Something it had done, kicking, or pulling on it's own umbilical cord, or who knew what, was tearing Betty 31 apart from the inside.

She had known that this was going to happen, but other than the possibility of giving Betty 31 herbs to make her miscarry, which she had cold-bloodedly decided against, she had no idea what to do about it. Maybe giving her the herbs would have been the better idea, because now she was apparently expected to do something about what was happening anyways, and she had no idea what to do. So far as she knew, there was nothing that _could _be done. She wasn't a doctor! Where was the doctor, anyways. Why wasn't he here?

"Where's Doctor Llewellyn?" Aster asked in a pleading, desperate voice. "I don't know what to do."

The Maestro was too furious to answer her, and everyone else in the room too frightened. Everyone, except one man. Daniel Wolfkiller was there, he had somehow gotten fairly near her without her noticing, but was only just barely in front of the rest of the crowd, obviously not daring to get too close to the woman who was miscarrying the Maestro's child.

"Doctor Llewellyn is dead." The stablemaster said in a grim voice. "He hung himself three days ago. His tools are there, next to her. _Do something_."

Three days ago had been the last time Betty 31 had been brought up to Doctor Llewellyn for one of her frequent checkups. Aster would have felt regretful, had she time to feel anything but fear, at her projecting of her own guilt onto the Doctor. Obviously he felt more guilt than her, he must have seen some sort of bad sign in how Betty 31's pregnancy was proceeding during his last examination of her, and killed himself out of guilt.

And as for her? She had chosen her own selfish survival. She had chosen it four months ago, and she chose it now. The emphasis in Wolfkiller's last words had been a very clear warning. _Do Something. _She knew that didn't mean saving Betty 31. The Maestro could care less about her. His promises to make her a Queen had never been anything but a lie. She was nothing but an incubator to him, for his son. Whom Aster was now expected to save, somehow.

There was a sudden shriek. Betty 31 was screaming, more blood poured from between her legs, and as Aster watched in horror, a tiny green fist burst through her skin in a spray of blood, and waved around frantically.

"Oh, my God." Aster felt faint in horror. But she didn't have the luxury of fainting. The Maestro was visibly quivering in fury.

"Do something!" He bellowed. "You've done all those damn surgeries on damned useless animals! Save him!"

It had actually been Aster's father who had performed the majority of surgeries on the animals. Aster had only done a few, most of the time she had just watched or assisted. Well, more than a few, maybe. But she was surely no Doctor. Still, she did know a lot of things. More than anyone else here, now that Doctor Llewellyn was dead.

_Cesearean. _She thought. Betty 31 was going to die within the next hour or so, from trauma and blood loss. Even if she lived, with the spinal injury, she'd be permanently crippled. But most likely she wouldn't live out the hour. Possibly Dr. Llewellyn could have saved her, though with the paralysis, he wouldn't have been doing her any favors. But Aster lacked Dr. Llewellyn's years of medical training. She had to get the child out before Betty died. She had to get the child out before then. Or fetus, rather. The skin on that green fist was nearly transparent, blood vessels easily visible through it. Was it old enough to survive? She had no idea. A human fetus at 5 months would never have survived. She didn't know if a gamma fetus could. But if she didn't do something, it would definitely die, and the Maestro would kill her if she did nothing.

She could not, however, do surgery on an unanesthetized patient. She didn't have the stomach for it, and the struggles would make surgery nearly impossible.

"I need opium." She said to the Maestro. "I have to put her under."

"No drugs." The Maestro said. His eyes were squinting mercilessly. "It could hurt the child. And there's no time. Do something. NOW!"

_You bloody fucking insane bastard. _Aster thought. _You did this to her, and now you're blaming me, because I can't force a human body to violate the laws of physiology._

There was only one other, horrible, inhuman thing left for Aster to do. At least, if she wanted to live. One narrow, bloody path to survival. At least, for as long as she could survive. And she had made that cold, dark choice, four months earlier.

She reached over for the satchel of Doctor Llewellyn's surgical tools, and took out a large, concave scalpel.

"Betty," Aster said in a trembling voice. "I need you to lift your head up and turn over a little. Over on your left side, you don't want to crush the… the baby's arm."

Tears of pain were streaking down Betty's face. She made choking noises, but nodded slightly. As she made the effort to help Aster turn her to the position she needed, the paralysis caused her to lose control of her bowels, and a foul smell filled the room.

"Someone clean that up." Aster didn't look to see if anyone obeyed her, and paid no attention to the woman the Maestro shoved towards her, who wiped away the wastes with her own silk dress, for want of anything else to use.

"What's happening?" Betty 31 said in a faint voice. "I can't feel anything. I feel cold."

"You… you're going to have a little boy." Aster said. She didn't know the gender of the child, and didn't tell Betty that the reason she couldn't feel anything was because her spine was broken, and the reason she was cold was because of the blood lose. There was nothing Aster could do about any of it. Nothing she could do to save Betty. Nothing… but the one thing she could do to save herself.

"Then… I'll be Queen. Can I see him?"

Aster breathed in. "Yes… you'll be Queen. You can see him pretty soon. Just stay there now."

_God save my soul. _Aster thought. She took the scalpel firmly in her hand, and with a sudden, swift motion, cut deep, through the woman's throat.

Blood gushed. There seemed a huge amount of it to Aster, despite what Betty had already lost to the injuries caused by her infant. Red liquid splashed on Aster's face, and over her green negligee, plastering it to her body and outlining curves that were finally beginning to resemble that of an adult woman. She ignored it. She tasted a metallic saltiness in her mouth, and other than swallowing it, ignored that as well. Betty 31 looked at her for a moment with wide eyes, full of puzzlement and the pain of betrayal. She gurgled, unable to give voice to her scream, with her windpipe severed. Aster turned away. She couldn't look at those eyes, so was spared seeing the moment when the woman's gaze changed from betrayal and horror to the emptiness of death.

"WHAT DID YOU DO!" The Maestro demanded.

"Be quiet!" Aster ordered him without thinking. "I have only a couple of minutes to do this, if I'm going to have any chance at all to save your child."

Aster took the scalpel and began slicing through Betty's lower abdomen, about halfway between her belly button and the line of her pubic hair. Carefully, she didn't want to accidentally cut the unborn baby, but this was the spot where, to the best of her recollection, one of Doctor Llewellyn's books had shown to cut, to perform a cesarean on a human woman. Sometimes her ability to recall such disparate bits of information, months later, was a curse. Or a blessing. If she hadn't remembered what she had seen in the Hall of Fallen Heroes years ago, she would likely not have realized that Morbius was still alive.

She sliced through skin, fat, and muscle, making a gaping hole, probably larger than it should have been. Not that it mattered, on a corpse. Doctor Llewellyn would have known what to do. Maybe he could have even saved Betty 31. But he was dead. And she was dead. Blood flowed across Betty 31's stomach and legs, and onto Aster's hands. She gave a final slice, and pulled out a baby. Or a fetus. She wasn't sure. It was a boy, green like his father, as large as a normal human baby, but looked undeveloped. The green skin was not only nearly transparent, but covered with a fine down. Lanugo. The limbs were spindly, not chubby like a newborn baby's should have been.

Spindly, but strong. As Aster pulled the infant from the mother it gave a sudden kick that felt like someone had hit her arm with a baseball bat. She bit back a swear word. She flexed her fingers several times, to get back the feeling. Fortunately none of her bones were broken. Surprising, considering what the infant had done to the mother. But perhaps it was weakening. Probably, it was.

As she took the baby out of Betty 31's womb, it was still attached by the umbilical cord. She set it on the mother's pale chest. It was a boy, his mouth opened but no sound came out.

Using every last ounce of her will, Aster forced herself to ignore the woman she had murdered, to ignore the blood that covered her from nearly head to foot and turned towards the weakly (for a Gamma, at any rate) kicking premature infant. It's head seemed too large for it's body, probably due to it's immature state. Had Betty 31 been able to carry it to term, it most likely would have had the proportions, if not the size, of a normal infant.

Again, the green baby gasped, but made no noise. Not good. Aster reached a finger into the baby's mouth and swept it around. No mucus. Definitely not good. Mucus would have been an easily soluble problem. She tried to tilt the baby's head back, but it resisted her, and despite it's premature state and spindly limbs, the tiny gamma boy was stronger than she was. Not good. She needed leverage. She lifted the infant onto the bloody legs of his mother, the mother Aster had just murdered, set his back atop one of Betty 31's thighs and pressed down. Either due to the leverage, or the fact that the baby was weakening, or both, she was able to get it's tiny, green haired head tilted down by pressing on his forehead as hard as she possibly could. Then she pinched the baby's nose shut and breathed into it's mouth.

That didn't help either. Aster's brain raced. It was what she had feared, what had occurred to her on a cold, dark night four months earlier. Even gammas needed to breath air, and the premature infant's lungs were simply too undeveloped for it to breath on it's own. She didn't know what to do, normally the mother's blood provided oxygen to an unborn baby, but the mother was dead, and Aster could obviously not take over the job. There was nothing she could do, but if she didn't do _something_ the Maestro would kill her.

Digging frantically through Doctor Llewellyn's large satchel, trying to find _something _that might give her an idea on how to save the baby, she came across a long length of clear tubing, the sort used for intravenous fluids, or blood transfusions.

_Blood. _Aster thought. She knew that the Maestro had incredible healing abilities. When she had read about the fights between him and the Heroes who had survived the War, over in the Hall of Fallen Heroes, there had been many mentions made of how the Maestro had healed from terrible wounds, such as being disemboweled, in only a few minutes. Could his blood somehow heal the baby? Grow it's lungs and save it? Aster didn't know, but it seemed worth a try, and she had to try _something._

She took two hollow needles and affixed one to each end of the tubing. Inspecting the baby, she slid one needle into a large green vein behind it's knee. Or tried to. Despite the translucent, delicate appearance of the premature Gamma baby's skin, it was as tough as iron. Even pressing with her entire weight, Aster couldn't get the needle through the skin, and all her efforts got her was a kick in the face from the feeble baby that split her lip open, adding new blood on her face to that of the woman she had already murdered.

_Fine. That doesn't work. But that's not the only blood vessel I can use on the baby, is it?_ Aster picked up the end of the umbilical cord, that snaked into the green infant's belly. She knew there were arteries and veins in the umbilical cord that supplied the infant with blood from the mother. She looked at the end of the cord, and saw three small blood vessels.

_Three?_ The odd number puzzled her. Then she shrugged. She could worry about it later. Right now she needed to find out which of those vessels were arteries, and which were veins. She took the hemostat off, and saw blood flowing out through just one of the vessels, the largest one, as it happened. Fine. That was a vein. The other two had to be arteries.

She jammed the needle as hard as it would go into one of the paired arteries, then called up to the Maestro. "I need you down here. The baby can't breath, it's lungs are too undeveloped. I want to try giving him a blood transfusion from you. Maybe it'll heal him. Mature his lungs or something."

Moving with surprising speed for someone that large, the Maestro got off his throne and knelt down next to Aster, holding out his arm. His veins were much larger than the premature infants, bulging from his muscles, but Aster remembered the problem she had had with the baby.

"I'm not strong enough to get the needle through your skin." She said. "You'll have to do it."

The Maestro obeyed instantly, and took the tubing and needle, no bigger than a thread in his huge fingers, and pushed it into a large vein in his elbow.

Or tried to. The Maestro was, no doubt, strong enough to push a needle through his own skin. But the needle itself was not strong enough to penetrate through his inhumanly strong hide. Rather than going into his vein, the needle bent at right angles as he pushed on it.

"DAMN IT!" He roared. "Get me another needle!"

Aster shook her head. She got another needle, but knew as she removed the broken one and replaced it, that it was pointless. The needles were designed to be used on ordinary human beings. She wasn't sure what they were made of, aluminum or steel, or something, but whatever it was, it simply wasn't strong enough to get through the Maestro's skin. She handed him the needle, but again, it bent in his hands.

"Aren't there any… adamantium needles?" The Maestro almost seemed to be pleading.

Aster looked baffled. "I… don't know what that is."

A weasel faced man, Aster recognized him as the Maestro's prime minister, shook his head slightly.

The Maestro gathered up the infant to himself.

"Do something!"He roared at Aster, spraying her with foul smelling spittle, but the roar almost seemed to be begging.

"There's nothing I can do." Aster said. "I can't make him grow a pair of lungs. I would if I could. He's just an eensy baby. It's not his fault. But there's nothing to be done."

Aster knew the last sentence was a lie. And she knew the Maestro knew it was a lie, too. There was one thing he could do. He could change back into his human form. Make himself vulnerable. Then there would be no problems with getting the needle into him. But she was not about to suggest that to the Maestro. The Maestro didn't know that she had seen him in his human fom, and if she told him that she knew, he would kill her. He would never let anyone even _know_ he could do that, much less ever do it in front of them.

Not ever.

Not even to save the life of his own son.

Like Aster, he chose his own life. At the cost of another.

Almost tenderly, the Maestro gathered the baby up in his arms, seemingly trying to get the infant to look at him. But the eyes of the green infant remained unfocused and panicked, and a few minutes later, it died with a terrible choking noise.

The Maestro was quivering, Aster wasn't sure if he was crying or enraged. She almost felt sorry for him.

Almost. Then she remembered what he was. The things he had done. To her. To the other women. To the people in Dystopia. To his own son, that he had let die, rather than display a moment's weakness.

_Screw him._ Aster thought. Let him be sad and in pain. She didn't care. He deserved it. Nobody cared about her sadness and pain, especially not the Maestro.

She made a mistake then, and drew attention to herself by speaking.

"Maybe… maybe we should bury him with his mother." It was a way to deal with her guilt. Perhaps a small way to let the woman she had murdered be Queen, as she had dreamed of, even if it was after her death.

The interruption infuriated the Maestro, and whatever momentary remnants of human feelings he might have felt for his son were burned away like mist in fire. He swatted out with one huge hand and knocked Aster halfway across the huge throne room. She felt her left arm twist at an awkward angle, and there was a snapping noise.

"STUPID USELESS FOOL OF A ZOOKEEPER!" The Green monster roared. "THE SLUT COULDN'T EVEN KEEP HIM ALIVE A FEW MORE MONTHS UNTIL HE COULD BREATH ON HIS OWN. SHE'S AS USELESS AS YOU!"

Still holding the dead premature baby in one arm, the Maestro violently kicked Betty 31's corpse across the room, and it landed near Aster.

"THROW HER DAMN STINKING CARCASS IN THE CHARNEL PIT, ZOOKEEPER. MAYBE YOU'RE GOOD FOR GARBAGE DISPOSAL. YOU DAMN SURE AREN'T GOOD FOR ANYTHING ELSE. AND I'LL TELL YOU ANOTHER THING, YOU ARE **NOT** GOING TO TRY AND SUGGEST THE SHULK TO ME, EITHER. I KILLED THE LAST MAN WHO TRIED THAT, AND I'LL KILL YOU IF YOU'RE FOOL ENOUGH TO MENTION HER AGAIN! AS FOR MY SON, HE WILL HAVE A PROPER FUNERAL AS BEFITS A ROYAL CHILD!"

The Maestro's pain filled scream was so loud that the roof actually trembled and several pieces of an ornate plaster frieze that decorated the ceiling fell to the floor. Aster's ears rang with pain. She didn't know if that hurt worse, or her arm did. It seemed like it had broken at the same place where it had broken before, three years earlier, during the Maestro's rape of her. Or maybe it was a different place. It hurt too badly to tell, and she wasn't sure who was going to set it, now that Doctor Llewellyn was dead.

_Maybe he was the smart one. _Aster thought. The Maestro was likely to do any terrible thing, to anyone, in his present state of mind. And who in the hell was the 'Shulk' that the Maestro had mentioned in his tantrum. Some sort of 'her', apparently. But Aster had never heard mention of such a woman before, which implied that the Maestro did not _want _anyone talking about the 'Shulk'. Whoever she was. Probably if the Maestro hadn't been in such an overwhelming rage, he wouldn't have mentioned her either. Well, Aster would take care to obey what the Maestro said, and not mention this 'Shulk' person, but she would certainly find out about her, whoever she was, as soon as she could.

Something itched in her lungs, and she swallowed desperately, trying not to cough. The way the Maestro was acting, he might very well kill her just for coughing. Her eyes teared, and she struggled to her feet, biting her lip against the pain of her arm. The Maestro had specifically ordered her to throw Betty 31's corpse in the charnel pit, so it would be prudent to do just that, regardless of the pain. Besides, once she was out of the throne room, she would be out of the worst of danger. The worst, at least. For all she knew, the Maestro in his current grief and rage might slaughter everyone in the palace and Dystopia as well before the night was over.

She bent over, her lungs itching worse, and took the mangled corpse by the ankle with her good right arm. She thanked whatever Gods there might be for enslaved sex toys of a monster that she had put on several inches of height and tens of pounds of bone and muscle in the past few years. As a 14 year old, she never would have been strong enough to manage the weight, especially with only one good arm.

She looked around as she dragged the body from the room. Most of the onlookers were still obviously terrified, afraid to move, almost afraid to breath. Wolfkiller had gone back by the wall, blending into the rest of them, but simply looked grim. She remembered what he had told her, all those years ago. _Keep it under your hat_. If only she had understood him and listened, none of the horrible events of the past few years would have even happened to her. And despite the fact that every time she forgot what Wolfkiller had said, horrible things always happened, she still kept forgetting and drawing attention to herself.

But then, she thought as dragged the body, if none of the horrible things had happened to her, if she were still at the Zoo with her father and Thumb, then she _also _wouldn't know that Morbius was still alive. Betty 31 had let her know that. And look how she had repaid her. With betrayal and murder. Was she really any better than the Maestro himself?

But regardless of what sort of horrible person she was, and what sort of horrible things she might have suffered, perhaps knowing that Morbius was alive was more important than all that. His blood drinking, despite how fixated he and everyone else had been about it, was probably the least important thing about him. Aster gave the body another pull, getting it around the corner of the door. It was probably hundreds of yards to the door that opened out into empty space, above the pit where the Maestro disposed of his garbage, including the people he killed. With the pain in her arm slowing her down, it might take her all night to get there. She didn't care. She had nothing but time. And too little time. She would buy her own life with blood and tears, if that's what it took. Nobody else knew the _vampire _was alive. Or at least, nobody who knew enough to try and protect him, instead of killing him. And if Morbius died, then that last little island of life, in Wisconsin, where the dead woman she was dragging behind her had come from, would die.

And after that? Nothing left in all the world, maybe. When the Maestro destroyed Dystopia, and Iceland, and everywhere else where anything had survived the war. Not a single place left for any animals, anywhere, ever again.

She pulled on the corpse, with renewed determination despite the weight and the pain. Regardless of the things she had done, she was still a Zookeeper. She was not going to let that happen.


	16. Chapter 16

Chapter 16. Red Vessels

Aster sat in an alcove in the hallway for hours, leaning against a statue. Her mind was numbed by pain and guilt. She didn't know what to do about her arm. Doctor Llewellyn was dead. He had a nurse, who might have known what to do, but Aster couldn't bring herself to go find her. The palace had been in chaos since the previous night. Aster her screams, and whispers, and running footsteps. A few times, people scurried past her, but didn't notice her in the shadows. She was afraid to move, and afraid to stay where she was. She was covered with blood. She didn't notice.

The thought of her arm finally got her moving. If she didn't find someone to do something about it, it would either heal wrong, or worse yet, she'd die of infection. She had paid a great deal for her life, and didn't want to throw it away for fear. Not that she had much choice, really. Doing other than what she had would not have saved the life of Betty 31 or her child for more than another hour. Their deaths had been inevitable since Doctor Llewellyn had performed the procedure that made Betty 31 pregnant with a gamma child that no simply human woman could possibly carry to term.

The thought of Doctor Llewellyn started making her angry, and the anger drove out some of the fear. Irrational though the thought was, Aster couldn't help but think that he had hung himself simply to cause trouble for her. Really, if he wanted to off himself, why couldn't he have waited a few more days, rather than doing it when he did, so that the Maestro forced her to do a job that she wasn't remotely qualified to do. Well, maybe she was barely qualified to do it, had the baby been a normal human infant, and far closer to full term, but not under the sort of circumstances that the Maestro had forced on her, demanding that she 'do something' immediately, in the middle of an unsterilized area, with no anesthetic.

_Bastards. _She thought. _Men are all bastards and pigs. When they aren't raping me they're blaming me for the mess they made, and making me clean it up and do their dirty work for them._

Still, it occurred to her that there was one man in the Maestro's palace who was, perhaps, slightly less of a pig than the rest of them. Daniel Wolfkiller. Mind you, he was still pretty much of a pig, given as he was to drinking and whoring. Aster had thought so when she was 12, and she still thought so. Still, there was a great difference between being 12, and being nearly 17, and Aster had been through a lot in that time. Enough that she distinguished, to some extent, different _degrees_ of piggishness. The stable master was a pig, and a drunk, and frequented whores, but compared to what most of the other residents of the Maestro's palace were into, such as rape, beatings, and orgies, whatever Daniel Wolfkiller was doing with his spare time almost seemed puritanical in comparison.

Still, she had to be sure. He had killed the tiger in the cage, and she still didn't know why he had done it. Was it mercy, or revenge? She had to know. A man who killed helpless dumb animals out of some twisted desire for revenge for injuries done years ago could not be trusted.

There was no way for her to get down to the stables, where she was most likely to find the man. The Maestro's female slaves were not let out of the palace without permission, and unescorted. Still, maybe she could get him to come in to her. There were windows overlooking the stables. Barred windows, but just because she couldn't fit through the bars didn't mean that nothing could.

Aster pulled herself to her feet with her one good hand. She hated her left arm. This was the second time the Maestro had broken it. Then again, she was right handed, so if it had been her right arm that had been broken either time, things would have been worse. She made her way over to the women's quarters. The guard was gone. Probably cowering somewhere like most of the rest of the residents of the Maestro's palace. Somewhere in the distance, she heard bellowing. The Maestro either mourning, or enraged, over the death of his son. She and everyone else would be lucky if he didn't tear the palace apart and send it all crashing down of their heads. It was not good, it was like being in a building that you knew was burning down. The smart thing to do would be to get out.

Getting out was not allowed. Not for her.

_If you can't get out of a burning building, what makes you think Wolfkiller would be stupid enough to come into one? _Came a mocking thought. She had no answer. But she needed help, and he was the only possible, unlikely hope that she had.

The supply closet in the women's quarters had a lot of everything the women needed for their day-to-day lives, ranging from bed linens, to different sizes of their dresses, to bath supplies and cosmetics. After taking a pillowcase from one shelf, it was to the shelves containing the cosmetics that Aster turned her attention. She needed something small, but hard. Several somethings, actually. She threw a few dozen tiny bottles of perfume into the pillowcase. Hopefully they would be enough.

Aster left the women's quarters and made her way through the palace, keeping well away from any people, and especially from the Maestro's combined screams and sobs. In one hallway, she found the body of a woman that had been strangled with her own dress. She stepped carefully over it, and kept moving as silently as she could. Finally, she found a barred window on the fourth floor that overlooked the stables. She looked down. There weren't any horses in the corral like there usually were. The place looked dead. Except… there was some movement of horses she could see dimly through the windows of the stable. So the horses were still there.

Was their keeper, Daniel Wolfkiller, still there? Aster didn't know, but thought it possible. In her view of the world, it would be a severe dereliction of duty for anyone who kept animals to simply abandon them. Not that she would put such a thing past the piggish, drunken stable master. But there was also the fact that even if the Maestro, in his madness and rage, was not angry with Wolfkiller _now, _he most definitely would be angry _later, _if the stable master left the horses uncared for. Possibly fear would keep the man at his job, if duty wouldn't.

Aster took a small bottle of perfume out of the pillowcase, stretched her arm out the window, and tossed it downwards, towards the stables.

The bottle landed in a mud puddle.

No good. Aster took another bottle, and tossed it again, throwing it harder and higher. The effort jarred her broken left arm, and she whimpered in pain.

This time the bottle landed on the roof of the stables, before rolling down the shingles, and landing in the corral.

Better. From her height, Aster could not hear whatever sound the bottle might have made, but she was sure it had made some sort of sound. If Wolfkiller was in the stables, he must have heard it. But maybe he thought it was simply part of the random chaos that had been going on in the palace since the previous night.

She tossed another bottle, and it landed in the mud again. Aster cursed. Throwing the bottles far enough meant twisting her body, and hurting her broken left arm. She took another bottle, and threw it harder. And another.

After about ten bottles had landed on the roof of the stables, and rolled off, Aster's pain-filled efforts finally had results. A large door in the side of the stables opened, and someone's head peered cautiously out.

Wolfkiller, Aster was sure. She recognized his dark hair and swarthy skin. Twisting despite the pain, she tossed another bottle at the roof of the stables. The stable master's head jerked slightly at the sound, and he looked around, but still didn't see her, or even look in her direction.

Aster threw another bottle, and this time, at the sound, Wolfkiller looked upwards, but still couldn't see her.

_Too dark in here. _Aster thought. _He can't see me inside the window._

She needed something to attract his attention. Acting quickly, she dumped the remaining perfume bottles out of the pillowcase, took it in her good right hand, stretched her arm as far as it could go through the bars, and began waving it around.

Wolfkiller saw the motion of the fabric. He held up one hand in a halting motion, signaling her to stop, before someone else saw it. Aster brought the pillowcase back in, and put the perfume bottles back inside. When she looked out again, Wolfkiller was standing under a tree, fairly near the palace. He was, perhaps, 50 feet below her window, and 30 feet from the walls of the palace. Within earshot, but if she shouted, someone might hear. As if he guessed her thoughts, she saw Wolfkiller bring one finger to his lips, then make a writing motion with his hands.

A note. Right. But she had nothing to write in, or on. Stupid. She should have thought of that, before throwing her bottles to get his attention, and brought a paper and pen. She didn't want to wander around in the palace, the way things were, to go get some. The more she wandered, the more likely she would run into danger.

Then again, come to think of it, she did have writing supplies with her. Aster took all the perfume bottles except one out of the pillowcase, then swung the pillowcase - hard - against the tile floor. The bottle inside shattered with a noise that sounded ear-splitting to her, but actually couldn't be heard more than 20 feet or so away. Nevertheless, Aster held her breath for several moments, until she was sure that the noise was not bringing anyone running to do something horrible to her.

When nearly a minute had passed, and all remained still (at least near her, she could still hear noise in other parts of the palace), Aster reached into the pillowcase and took out the shards of glass. She selected the longest, thinnest one, and quickly jabbed it into her own leg.

Blood welled up. Aster spread out the pillowcase on the floor, dipped her right pinky finger into her own blood, and began writing as neatly as she could (which was not very neatly at all) on the green fabric:

_Aster. Broken arm. _

_Need help. _

_Bring boards and cloth._

Aster waited a few minutes for the writing to dry, put several of the perfume bottles back into the pillowcase for weight, then tossed it out the window towards the tree where the stable master was hiding in the shadows. It landed about 10 feet away from him, and he prudently waited until he was sure that nobody else had seen it land, before crawling, nearly on his belly, out to it, and snagging it with one hand. He snaked back to the shade of the tree, and read what Aster had written.

Wolfkiller rolled up the fabric and stuck it into his belt. He pointed towards Aster, then put his hands together, pointing his fingers like the hands of a clock, and turned them slightly. Aster couldn't see how far he turned them, but obviously he meant to come up to her, but not immediately. Understandable. Aster had no idea what was going on in most of the palace, but most likely there was some danger that Wolfkiller couldn't get past safely at the present moment. It didn't matter. She wasn't going to die within the next few hours just from a broken arm, and it wasn't like she had any important appointments to keep.

Aster wedged herself behind one of the larger statues in the hallway, hoping that if anyone came to this part of the palace, they wouldn't see her. A pity she had had to throw the pillowcase out to Wolfkiller. With the perfume bottles inside, it would have made a good blackjack. If only she still had it. If only she could swing it, with her broken arm causing her pain with every violent movement. And if only she had flower, sugar, and eggs, she could make cake.

She laughed slightly at the thought, then coughed as her lungs began itching again. Had her ribs rebroken? They didn't hurt, but who knew. She needed to be quiet, so she stopped laughing and took only shallow breaths. Time seemed to go funny, first fast, then slow, almost as if she were first being given codeine, then some sort of stimulant. A few times she thought she dozed off, only to be awoken by more screams or panicked footsteps, or other alarmed noises in different parts of the palace.

From the position of the sun outside her window, it seemed like early evening before Daniel Wolfkiller finally found her. The weather had gotten cold, or so it seemed, and she was shivering uncontrollably when she heard a loud whisper.

"Aster?" Silence for a few seconds, then another whisper. "Aster?"

She tried to answer, but her teeth chattered, and her mouth was dry. There were a few perfume bottles next to her, and she took one of them and threw it down the hall.

"Thank God." Daniel Wolfkiller came down the hallway. "You're still alive. One of the lucky ones. Let me see your arm."

Aster tried to raise her arm and couldn't. The stable master took her arm, then released it. "My god, you're burning up."

How could she be burning up when she felt so cold. "Have to get out of here." Her teeth chattered.

Wolfkiller shook his head. "There is no getting out. The Maestro's gone mad. It's worse this time, than before. You're lucky I could get in."

"Before?" She couldn't think straight. "What before? I have to get out of here."

"There's no getting out." Wolfkiller insisted. "Listen to me. Try to concentrate. You're sick. You've been sitting here for two days. You have a fever. I don't know what to do. You have to tell me. Do you know what to do?"

"Cold…" Aster tried to think. She had been worried about infection, earlier. "Hot. Infection. Have to find Doctor Llewellyn."

"Doctor Llewellyn is dead. I told you that. Do you remember?"

"No." Then she did remember, but couldn't figure out how to say so. "Last night."

"Yes. He's gone." Wolfkiller shook his head. It had been three nights ago. She had completely lost track of time. Not a good sign. "Aster, listen to me. What would Doctor Llewellyn do? About your arm and the infection. Can you tell me that?"

"My arm, my arm. Always my arm."Her voice was a singsong, then went back to talking. "Have to splint it. Pull on the bone. Make it like the good arm."

"Okay." Using her good arm as a mirror model made sense to Wolfkiller. "What about the infection?"

"Need Doctor Llewellyn's pills. Amoxycillin. Penicillin. Something. Don't know how much."

"Bloody hell." Daniel Wolfkiller swore. There must have been hundreds of different bottles of drugs in the dead doctor's hospital. He didn't even know if they had any dosages on them.

"Listen, I'm going to get you to the hospital, you hear? It's going to hurt, but try to stay awake."

"Want to sleep." Aster disagreed.

"No sleeping." He swore again. "Aster, listen to me. I need you awake."

"I am awake." She contradicted her own statement of a few minutes ago.

"You've been watching the Maestro. I've seen you. I know a hunter when I see one." Wolfkiller held her chin in his hands, forcing her to look at him.

"I used to hunt rabbits." Aster said proudly.

"That's good." said Wolfkiller. "You learned good. I saw you hunting the Maestro, but he never saw you. Listen to me, I need to know. Did you learn anything? Did you find a way to kill him?"

"Kill him? The Maestro." Aster began laughing. "Why ask me. You should have asked that woman. Betty 31. I killed her, you know."

"Never mind the dead woman." The stable master began to get irritated with her feverish, non-lucid state. "The Maestro killed her, not you. Either way, she's dead. So I'm asking you. Does the Maestro have any weaknesses. Any way to kill him?"

"Theres a way to kill him. Maybe." Aster looked sly. "Betty told me."

"Jesus bloody Christ." The man forced himself to patience. "Ok. Betty told you. What did Betty tell you?"

"She came from Milwaukee."

"I knew she wasn't from here." Wolfkiller agreed. "It doesn't matter where she came from. What did she tell you, about how to kill the Maestro?"

"Milwaukee…" Aster couldn't think how to explain. "It's the marching song Thumb and I used to sing. Back in the Zoo."

Much to Wolfkiller's horror, Aster began singing at the top of her lungs:

"I knew a man from old Milwaukee!

He just loved to walkie-talkie!

Sound off! One! Two!

Sound off! Three! Four!

Sing it all down now!

Four! Three! Two! One!"

"Aster! Shut up!" Wolfkiller hissed and clapped his hand over her mouth. "You have to be quiet!"

"I have to go to Milwaukee!" She insisted, mumbling through the hand that covered her mouth.

"That's a song. There is no Milwaukee here. It's in another state. Now be quiet. I'm going to get you to the hospital."

He lifted up Aster and got her right arm under his shoulder. "Can you walk?"

"I can walk to Milwaukee. It's in the book. Fundamentals of Biochemistry. Never understood it though."

"Yeah, well welcome to the club." Wolfkiller grumbled. "I can't understand you, either. And you don't need to walk to Milwaukee. Just the hospital."

"Okay. Is the book there?"

"Yes, whatever. There's lots of books there. You can read them all, if you just keep quiet and come with me." He had to say something to get her to cooperate.

"Okay. Sounds good." Aster nodded, and staggered along the hallway as Wolfkiller guided her to the hospital. It was dark, and the glass on the door broken. Wolfkiller reached through the shattered glass and unlocked the door on the inside, so that they could enter. He didn't bother asking her any more questions. The girl was delirious with fever, and he didn't understand the sort of references she was coming up with. Her brain worked in some sort of code different from that of most people. He'd get nothing out of her until she was better.

Wolfkiller didn't dare to make too much light, that might be seen from the outside, so lit a single candle, and put it inside a lantern. He set Aster on one of the beds, and began looking for the pills she had said Doctor Llewellyn would have recommended. Fortunately, other than the damage to the door, the hospital was fairly intact, all the bottles of pills and liquids still on the shelf. The stable master didn't understand the manner in which they were organized. Probably they were organized by their purpose, but he didn't know enough about medicine to make sense of that, so he had to read the labels on every single one, before finding one of them that she had mentioned. Penicillin. The bottle said to give two pills to an adult (or children over 12) every 6-8 hours.

6 hours sounded better to the stable master. If even that long, but he was worried about second guessing whatever medical expert had come up with the dosage on the label. He took two of the pills, got a large glass and filled it up with water from the sink, and brought it to Aster.

He sat Aster up, opened her mouth, put the pills in, and handed her the glass of water. "Swallow those and drink this. You haven't had anything to drink for nearly three days."

Aster swallowed the pills dry, instead, then drank the water afterwards, choking and sputtering. Her skin was still hot. Too hot, Wolfkiller thought. He looked around and found a thermometer, and put it in Aster's mouth. Which she promptly spat out and the stable master barely caught it before it hit the floor.

Bloody hell. He thought. He didn't know what to do. She was too hot. He had to cool her off. He took the blanket off another bed and soaked it in cool water in the sink, then wrapped it around Aster.

"No! Cold!" Her teeth began chattering, and the blood crusted on her body and clothing began coming off and smearing onto Daniel.

"I know it's cold. You have to keep it on!"

"Cold!" She kept thrashing. By pure force, Wolfkiller kept the soaked blanket on her. She stopped struggling, and he took the opportunity to fill a large basin with cold water and pour it on her, rewetting the blankets. He did it three times, and tt seemed after a while, she didn't feel quite so hot, so he finally relented and let her wrap herself up in several dry blankets. That didn't turn out well, either, as after a few minutes, she kicked them off, making the opposite complaint, that she was 'hot'. But no sooner had she kicked them onto the floor than she began complaining of being 'cold' again.

A few times Aster lay quietly, and Wolfkiller tried to ask her what she had learned about how to kill the Maestro, with poor results. Half the time she began talking again about her childhood marching song about Milwaukee (and jet planes, and other things), the other half the time she said it was too dangerous to ever tell.

During one of her less lucid periods, Wolfkiller took the opportunity to stuff a towel in Aster's mouth, and set her arm as best he could. He actually felt the bone 'click' into place when he pulled on it, and it seemed to match her other arm in the way it looked and felt (other than being swollen) and he hoped he had done a proper job. There was no-one else. He used several cloth strips to tie the boards he had brought to her arm, and it seemed like perhaps he had done _something _right because a while after he did it, she started to feel less hot. Or maybe that was just hopeful thinking on his part, because when he took the towel out of her mouth, she didn't mention her arm having been set, either to thank him or to complain about the pain, and began talking nonsense about her marching song again.

By this time he had learned to tune her out whenever she started singing, though once when she got too loud, he had to stuff the towel back in her mouth. Possibly the song about Milwaukee meant _something. _Probably it did, the stable master decided. Aster had mentioned that Betty 31 had come from there, and that she had learned some possible way to kill the Maestro from the woman. But what it was, he had no way of knowing. He paid no attention to her ravings as he cleaned her up and dressed her in one of the hospital gowns.

Six hours exactly passed, according to the clock on the hospital walls, during which he kept giving Aster water as often as she would drink it. With something of relief, as soon as the recommended minimum dosage interval went past, he gave Aster another two pills. He glanced at the clock. He had left large amounts of food and water for all the horses before sneaking into the palace. They could probably go a few days before they began neighing in hunger. Eventually, he'd have to go back, though.

Two more days passed that way. The noises in the palace first became very quiet, then seemed to return to *something* like normality. Though Wolfkiller sensed an ominousness in the noises he heard. He shook his head. He needed to get back to the stables. By this time the horses had probably gone through the food and water he had left them, and would begin neighing pretty soon, and attracting attention. If that didn't attract attention, the smell from their uncleaned stalls probably would. Perhaps it was safe to leave Aster, even though he wasn't sure if he would be able to get back. Her fever had broken, and she was having lucid moments where she reached for the glass of water that he kept filled, and drank it voluntarily, though she still wouldn't answer his questions about the Maestro. During her most lucid moment, when he asked her about it, he was fairly sure that she understood the question at that moment, but rather than answer, glared at him suspiciously and asked him:

"Why did you kill the tiger?"

Wolfkiller didn't see what the dead animal had to do with anything, and didn't answer. The next time he looked at Aster, she was asleep. He looked at the clock. He _really_ needed to get back to the stables. The risk was less, now. She had stopped her loud singing and other ravings. She was having lucid moments. Especially if he set things up so most of what she needed was within her reach. In case he couldn't get back.

He shoved a long bench next to Aster's bed and set the penicillin on it. Then he took a few minutes to fill several large bottles of water that he placed on the bench as well, along with several cans of fruit and a can opener that he got from a cabinet in the hospital's small cooking area. Then he wrote a note, and pinned it to the front of her gown. Then he left, locking the door behind him.

He meant to return, but was never able to. Aster did not learn why for over a year.

Aster awoke to a dry mouth, a sweat covered body, and full bladder several hours later. She kicked off the blankets, cooling herself. She remembered drinking water earlier, from a glass, and fumbled around for it. There was no glass, but several bottles. She sat up and felt something stiff in front of her. There was a note, attached to her gown by a safety pin. She sat up, fumbling around with the paper. Her left arm was done up with some boards and cloth strips. So… apparently Wolfkiller had gotten her note. She remembered seeing him. But where had he gone? She tried to open the pin with her right hand, but gave up. Her fingers were too clumsy, so she just tore the note off and read it.

_Aster. If you are reading this, it means that I have not yet returned from the stables. If more than a few hours goes by, I probably am not coming back. I apologize for leaving you, but things have gotten very bad since the death of the Maestro's son. He's gone completely mad. You have been in a fever the past few days. I've done what I could, and think you are better, but the horses only have a certain amount of food and water, and if they start attracting attention it would endanger both of us. So I have to leave to attend to them. If I don't return, it either means I am dead, or it is too dangerous for me to return._

_On the table next to you is some water. You need to drink as much as you can. There are also cans of fruit, if you get hungry. Most importantly are some pills. You told me to get them, and I think they are working. Take two of them every six hours. I don't know how many you should take, if one bottle will be enough or not._

_Be very careful, before you leave the hospital. This is not the first time the Maestro has tried to produce a son. The last time was ten years ago. It killed my wife. I didn't have the courage to do for her what you did for Betty. I wish I had. He is worse this time, than last time. He threatened to burn Doctor Llewellyn to death if he couldn't make it work this time. So, now you know why he killed himself._

_Do what you have to, to stay alive. Find a way out, if you can. If I'm still alive, I'll find you._

There was some more writing, but it was scribbled out, and the note was signed:

_Daniel Wolfkiller._

Aster regarded the note, and didn't know what to think. How long ago had it been written? She felt terribly thirsty, but perhaps that was just the fever. The note mentioned pills. She didn't think it would be too bad to take just two pills, a little bit early. Using her right hand and her mouth, she opened the jar, shook two pills onto her sheets, and swallowed them dry. She closed the jar of pills, and drank some water.

After a few hours, she got hungry. But the canned fruit presented a problem. It was hard to open them, with just one hand. She didn't want to use her left hand more than she had to. It _looked _like the stable master had set her arm correctly, but she didn't trust the boards and cloth as much as she trusted a real plaster cast. She finally managed by using her right hand to squeeze the can opener into the top of a can, punching a small hole in it. Then she moved the can opener slightly, and squeezed again, lengthening the hole. It took about 50 or so squeezes, but she finally got the lid off. She held the can up to her lips and drank the peaches down.

Hours went by, and she concluded that either Wolfkiller wasn't coming back at all, or was having some sort of difficulty doing so. Hadn't he had some trouble finding her in the first place? She couldn't remember. She took two more pills, and had some more cans of peaches.

Morning came, and she felt stronger, but also more hungry. Aster swung her legs out of bed and tested them gingerly on the floor for several seconds, before deciding that she was strong enough to walk. She certainly didn't want to fall down on her broken arm. Especially not if Wolfkiller wasn't coming back. Staying near the wall to brace herself, she made her way to the hospital's small kitchen area, and looked through the cabinets in the dim light from the narrow windows near the ceiling. There were cans of tuna and stew. Meat sounded good to her famished stomach. She didn't know any way to cook it safely. Not with a bad arm, and the distinct possibility that the smell of cooking food might attract attention. She ate a can of tuna cold. Later on, she had some stew the same way.

Aster wasn't sure how much time went by, eating cold food and taking pills by herself in the abandoned hospital. Finally, the pills ran out, and the food was running low. She had to leave. She didn't know if it was safe.

She found her sheer green dress that she had been wearing, that terrible night. It was covered in blood. She could hardly wear it safely. Assuming that the Maestro had gotten _slightly _over his grief and rage, she didn't want to remind him of it by having him see her wearing _that. _Aster wadded it up and threw it into the trash. But what could she wear? The doctor's clothes? She didn't want to remind the Maestro of Doctor Llewellyn, either. He might just decide to burn _her _to death, the way he had threatened to do with the hapless physician.

_The hell with it. _She finally decided. She had _nothing _she could wear safely, so _nothing _is what she decided to wear. Possibly she would get raped. It would hurt. Not as bad as being burned to death. If she cooperated, maybe the rapists wouldn't re-break her arm.

As it turned out, she wasn't raped. She went past several guards. There seemed to be more of them than there had been, before. They also seemed afraid of something, standing abnormally stiffly, and barely daring to glance at her nude body as she went past.

_Are they all eunuchs? _She wondered. In the past, the Maestro mainly used eunuchs for guarding his female slaves. Though sometimes he punished men by making eunuchs of them. Possibly in his insanity, he had castrated all of the guards in the palace. She wasn't about to ask them.

As she made her way back to the women's quarters, she noticed a bad smell. Was there a dead animal somewhere about? She heard the buzzing of flies, and rounding a corner, she found the source of the smell and nearly gagged.

There was a woman's body in the middle of the hallway. In fact, she recalled seeing it before. It was the dead, strangled woman she had seen a few weeks earlier, when she had been dragging Betty 31's body to the charnel pits. Except rotted. The skin was shriveled in some places, slimy in others, and maggots… she had to look away.

_Why is that still here?_ Aster wondered. Of course, she knew the answer, even as she asked herself the question. The body was still there for the same reason _anything _bad in the Maestro's palace was there. Fear. Fear of the Maestro. If that body were still lying where it was, rotting, the only reason could be because the Maestro had forbidden anyone to move it.

_That can't be good. _Aster didn't know much about psychology, but she was pretty sure that demanding that dead bodies be left in the middle of a hallway could not be very normal. But then, maybe it wasn't all that different from putting people's heads on spikes in front of the palace. Except in degree. Whatever madness the Maestro had, it was getting worse.

She tiptoed around the edge of the body, and with relief, turned a corner in the hallway, where the smell was diminished. From there, it was only a few minutes to the women's quarters, and Aster nodded to the new guard, as if her walking around entirely nude were a commonplace occurrence.

"Betty 23." She gave the name she had been assigned. The guard looked puzzled at her nudity, then even more puzzled as he consulted his clipboard.

"23...? There's no 23 here." He flipped through a few pages. "Wait a minute… Aster… Aster Aversa? You're still alive? The Maestro didn't kill you?"

"I'm here, aren't I." Aster pointed out.

"Well… I guess… Betty." The guard looked unplussed. "I guess if you're still alive, then the Maestro must not want you dead. Or maybe he has something special planned for you."

The guard waved her past, and Aster stepped into the women's quarters. She didn't want to think what 'having something special planned' for her might mean. Best to keep out of everyone's way, and try not to be noticed. She tried to move as quietly as she could towards her bed, so as not to be noticed by the other women.

No such luck. There were far fewer women in the room than there had been, and the ones left were wary with fear. Aster's attempted silent entrance was noticed almost immediately. One of the women gasped, and held back a shriek, and the rest of them looked at her with bulging eyes so shocked, that it was almost as if she was not merely naked, but covered with blood as she had been after her murder of Betty 31.

"Oh my God." The woman who spoke looked almost green. "It's the murderer. She's still alive!"

"She killed Betty 31!" Another woman cried.

"Keep the hell away from us, murderer!"

"What did we do now, that the Maestro is punishing us with HER!" The woman who said that actually looked like she was on the verge of tears.

Aster gaped at the unfairness of it. It had been their precious _Maestro _who had killed Betty 31. Not her. If she hadn't done what she had, Betty 31wouldn't have lived for more than an hour longer, and Aster would have been killed by the Maestro as well. What the hell good would that have done?

She was about to try to explain, when one of the taller women pointed severely at Aster. "If you have to stay here, then you sleep in the bed at the back, over by the drafty window. Well away from the rest of us, murderer, and we certainly don't want you between us and the door! Trapping us in here and slitting all our throats in our sleep, I shouldn't wonder. What were you, jealous that she was getting to be Queen, and you couldn't even get to be a Zookeeper? That why you did it?"

Aster said nothing. She went over to the indicated bed. Maybe a window was better. She'd rather listen to the noises of the wind and insects, than whatever was going on in the palace. And if she was to be alone… well she'd been that way for a long time, anyways. Ever since she came here. Even when the other women would still talk with her, she was alone. They were simply far too different in intelligence and psychology.

She lay down on the bed, not even bothering to get one of the barely there negligees from the supply closet. She'd just have to go past the other women again to do that, and she didn't want to listen to any more of their unfair accusations. Maybe tomorrow, but not tonight.

She closed her eyes.

It was exactly a week before her seventeenth birthday.


	17. Chapter 17

Chapter 17. Sinister Resident.

_Resident: Unable to Leave. From __The Devil's Dictionary__ by Ambrose Bierce._

Things got far worse in the Maestro's palace over the next year. Previously, there had been _some _resemblance of order and sanity in the place. Some sort of routine, however horrible things had been at times. Now, everything was chaotic, changes were random and for the worse.

The hospital no longer functioned. Doctor Llewellyn was dead, and his nurse was nowhere to be found. Aster figured that if the nurse had had any brains at all, she had probably left around the time the Maestro had threatened to burn Doctor Llewellyn to death, if he couldn't accomplish the medically impossible. _She _at any rate, would not have stuck around if she had been in the nurses's position, knowing that suicide was probably the least painful option left for the Doctor, and thereafter, the Maestro probably would have made the same impossible demands of her.

At least the nurse had been able to leave. She only worked in the palace, she wasn't a slave like Aster, imprisoned in the place. Of course, the Doctor went home after his shift, as well, but had he tried to run, the Maestro would have noticed his absence almost immediately, and hunted him down. Likely, he may have delayed his own suicide until the last possible few days, in order to give his nurse time to find a safe place to hide. Aster wasn't sure what to think of either one. Despite her formidable intelligence, her young age and slightly autistic point of view made judging grey shades of morality difficult. She wasn't sure if she should condemn the dead Doctor Llewellyn as evil for performing the artificial insemination procedure that had killed Betty 31, then killing himself so that Aster ended up having to deal with the end results, or excuse him because the Maestro really left him with no choice, or even regard him as a hero, since he may have risked being burned to death by the Maestro by waiting to kill himself in order to give his nurse a better chance to escape. If she had escaped. Aster didn't really know what had become of her, other than that she hadn't seen her in a few months.

It was fortunate that during the chaos immediately after the death of the Maestro's unborn child, that nobody had tried to enter the hospital where Aster had been hiding. That fact did change, however, and a few weeks later, when Aster walked past the abandoned facility, she saw that the door was broken off it's hinges, and most of the drugs of the narcotic sort had been made off with. Other bottles, containing things like vitamins and antibiotics were still there, although in a lot of cases they had been pointlessly broken or spilled.

Aster gave the matter some thought, and as soon as she thought it safe to remove the improvised board and cloth splint from her arm, she snuck into the ruined hospital one day. Sorting through the mess, she gathered up the bottles of vitamins and antibiotics that were still intact, tossed them in a pillowcase, and hid them inside a ventilation duct in a store-room several floors away, along with a selection of some of the simpler tools Doctor Llewellyn had used.

Nobody noticed her thefts, amidst the other thefts and general vandalism that occurred within the former hospital. Aster didn't know what would happen if someone in the palace, especially one of the slave, were hurt or got sick in the future. Either they'd get better on their own, or they'd die.

There were other, sinister, changes as well. The slightly more agreeable guards, the ones who could sometimes be bribed with gems or sex for large favors, or who might do small favors out of kindness, were gone. The only guards left out of those who had previously worked in the palace were the more sadistic sort, like Paul Rasse and his group of rapist friends. There were a number of new guards in the palace, who Aster had never seen before, and to a man, they were either as brutal as Rasse – or worse.

The Maestro's 'court' sessions changed in nature. Previously, they had consisted of three parts, the formal presentation of tributes and taxes, criminal charges against those who had offended the maestro or favored friends of his, and disputes between private citizens. Now, the first and third parts were gone. Tribute and taxes were simply seized at random, with the amount being determined by the Maestro's caprice (or the greed of the guards he sometimes sent to seize it for him). Nor did anybody dare to bring 'private disputes' before the Maestro any longer, as his reaction to the first few people who had dared to do so, following the death of his unborn son, had simply been to listen to the complaints for a few minutes with a faintly irritated expression on his face, then to seize _both _parties by the head, one in each hand, and snap their necks with a quick jerk for 'wasting his time with petty nonsense'. The continuous injustice reminded Aster of something she had read in her thick, coverless book a long time ago, where there had been no "means, methods, rules or agencies of proof" left in the world.

The criminal trials, alone, remained fairly unchanged as to what they had been. Although it seemed to Aster that they were conducted faster than they had been previously. The accused was simply marched out and flung onto the floor, the charges against him read, and execution carried out immediately. Usually, this involved the Maestro either breaking their necks, or their skull. However, as time went on, Aster began to notice a change in the manner of executions. At times, the Maestro would twist a person's neck several times, wringing their head off the way Aster had often done to rabbits back when she hunted them, and the blood jetting from the neck would drench Aster and the other women sitting at the Maestro's feet, as well as the nearer guards (the Maestro had very few people left in his 'court') and the Maestro himself. The Maestro and the guards generally ignored the blood, as well as the convulsions of the decapitated body. Aster was inclined to ignore it as well, but pretended disgust when she saw that the other women were doing so. _Not _showing disgust would attract attention to herself, and that was more dangerous now than it had ever been before. Sometimes the Maestro would order someone to clean up the 'mess'. Other times, when he failed to do so, the body was simply left lying on the floor, in it's own blood and excrement. Nobody dared to suggest cleaning it up to the Maestro, if he didn't order it himself.

As if that were not bad enough, about four months after the Maestro's son had miscarried, some of the executions began to be carried out in an even worse manner. For some time, meals had been rather irregular and scanty. Most of the cooks were gone, and meals were served whenever the Maestro demanded them, by whoever he demanded it of (usually his female slaves). This could mean, depending on the Maestros' particular whim at the time, that breakfast be served at 11:00 at night, or supper be served at 4:00 in the morning. The power in the palace had been irregular for some time, as most of the technicians and engineers had either been killed, or fled, meaning that often the stoves didn't work. Aster managed to gain the very fleeting gratitude of a few women by rigging up some canisters of propane to an improvised grill to cook, but the Maestro himself actually created a more lasting solution by having a large fireplace, nearly 15 feet high and deep constructed in his throne room, directly behind his throne.

The Maestro would sit in front of this fire, like a giant green demon guarding the gates of hell. It was his latest toy, and far larger than it really needed to be simply to cook his meals. It used an incredible amount of wood, which Aster heard in whispers from the guards was now part of the 'tribute' demanded of the citizens of Dystopia. If they failed to supply whatever amount of wood the Maestro demanded they supply (which was often the case given that trees grew very poorly ever since the war), he got the wood regardless, simply by dismantling their house. The lucky were able to find some sort of poor shelter to live in, even if it were only a tent or a shed or a corner of a barn owned by someone else. The unlucky often froze to death.

It was this fireplace, made of green bricks (which eventually turned somewhat grayish with soot) that was involved in a horrible change regarding the manner in which some of the unfortunate condemned were executed. Aster had never like the fireplace, ever since it was built. The overly large size and the subsequent need for huge amounts of wood struck her as wasteful. It also meant that it was extremely hot to even sit anywhere near it, as Aster had to when she was made to act as an ornament and unwilling witness to the Maestro's increasingly grisly 'court' sessions. The heat was even worse when she had to help cook the Maestro's meals on it. Often, the heat was so bad that neither she nor the other women could get close enough to the blaze to cook with it, and had to use long pokers to drag a few blazing logs onto the overly large hearth to cook with. The flowing, sheer dresses they wore were also highly flammable, and after the first time she was ordered to cook the Maestro's dinner for him in the new fireplace (or perhaps inferno would have been a better word) Aster took to bringing a large bucket of water and a pitcher from the kitchen with her, and pouring it over herself to soak her clothing and hair.

The Maestro seemed amused by the way her wet clothing clung to her body. The other women thought her odd, at first, and did not care to emulate a socially awkward person they regarded as a 'murderer'. Until a few days later when one of the other women's dresses caught on fire while she was trying to roast potatoes in the huge fireplace. The woman survived, but was badly scarred, and a few days later, she disappeared. Nobody dared ask what had happened to her, but the other women began emulating Aster thereafter, and soaking their dresses with water when the Maestro made them cook by the huge blaze.

Aster did not like heat. She preferred cooler, autumn days, when the flower she was named after was generally blooming. She hated sitting near the enormous fireplace, and she loathed cooking with it even worse.

She _abominated_ what the Maestro eventually began doing with the fireplace.

Aster had, to some degree, gotten used to the executions, whether the Maestro did them by snapping someone's neck, twisting their head off, or hurling them violently against the nearest convenient wall. However, shortly after he had the fireplace built, the Maestro was conducting a 'trial' for a man he accused of trying to 'tamper' with the water supply to his palace. Aster didn't know what 'tampering' referred to, much less whether or not the man was guilty of such a thing. She simply sat, unmoving, trying not to attract attention to herself, and bracing herself for the inevitable execution.

The inevitable came, but took a vastly more horrible form than it ever had before. The Maestro's hand flashed out, far faster than Aster's eye could follow, but rather than simply smashing or mangling the unfortunate man, the Maestro _seized _the man and hurled him bodily into the blazing fireplace behind him.

The screams were awful. The man's body caught on fire almost instantly, yet he was still screaming, and flapping his limbs like a headless chicken. Aster nearly vomited and had to look away. A few of the other women began screaming, despite venomous glares from the Maestro and one of them actually fainted.

After that, the Maestro would fling about one condemned 'criminal' in ten into the blazing fireplace. There was no rhyme or reason that Aster could discern as to which ones. Some of them that were 'guilty' of such minor offenses that a sane person wouldn't even have noticed them would be hurled alive into the fireplace. Others who had done something that might conceivably have deserved severe punishment (though under the current circumstances they were entirely understandable) like throwing a pre-war grenade at the Maestro. Some people, from what Aster heard the guards talking about in whispers, would commit suicide on even hearing the rumor that the Maestro was going to accuse them of a 'criminal' act. Others tried, generally unsuccessfully, to flee Dystopia, and were usually either hunted down or died of radiation poisoning. One man who was dragged into the Maestro's throne room on some charge or the other managed to somehow smuggle in an ancient pre-War gun under his clothing, and as soon as the Maestro began reading the charges against him, brought it out and shot two guards and himself. After that, all the condemned 'criminals' were brought into the Maestro's presence stripped and bound. That didn't prevent some of them from committing suicide with poison capsules they had hidden in their mouths.

The smell in the palace was terrible. The Maestro would let some bodies lying around in his throne room or hallways for weeks – or permanently. The sewage system frequently backed up due to lack of maintenance. Whenever he threw a hapless condemned 'criminal' into his fireplace, the smell of burning flesh was awful. The only bright spots in all of this were firstly that Aster gained a slight amount of tolerance from the women who otherwise condemned her as 'murderer' due to being able to figure out and repair most of the plumbing problems in the women's quarters with wrenches and other tools that had been left lying around, and secondly, that an increasing number of the 'criminals' were actually already dead – having committed suicide – before the Maestro read the accusations to their corpses, and carried out a ludicrous mock 'execution' on their already dead bodies.

As the smell grew worse, Aster grew very worried about the risk of disease. She made it a point to keep as far away from any bodies as she could, and to scrub herself in the showers, thoroughly, twice a day. More often, if she was feeling especially paranoid, or had encountered something that seemed particularly unsanitary. Sometimes she thought of the cache of antibiotics she had gotten from the ruined hospital, and was glad. It seemed increasingly likely that she was going to need them. She was lucky in that she did not get sick. Perhaps her frequent washing helped prevent it. Some of the other women occasionally got sick, and Aster reluctantly did not bring them any of the antibiotics. If she brought them, she'd have to explain where she had gotten them, and she didn't care to endanger herself by doing that. Besides which, she had no way of knowing whether she would need them for herself in the future. She did give them what advice and help she safely could when they were sick, including eating well, getting plenty of water (with a bit of sugar and salt in it), putting hot compresses on boils and lancing them when they came to a head. Usually the women got better. A few times, they didn't.

Aster had occasionally wondered, ever since the Maestro's tantrum, the terrible night his unborn son had died, who 'Shulk' was, whom the Maestro had warned her not to 'suggest' or he would kill her. Wondering about it was one of the few distractions she had from the horror her life had become. She wasn't sure how she found out, whether it was from reading in the Hall of Heroes, or hearing the Maestro laughing suggest to his guards after flinging a disappointing (to him) dead criminal into the fire, that he should 'put the Shulk's sarcophagus in there'. Time and living had become a nightmare and confusion. But at some point she did learn, however it was, that apparently the Maestro had a cousin, a woman, who was also a gamma creature, like him, and who had tried, along with the 'abominable creature' to kill the Maestro many years before. They failed. The Abominable Creature escaped, though he had lost an eye and a hand, but the 'Shulk' was not so lucky. The Maestro had locked her up in a 'sarcophagus', something that looked like a huge metal coffin. Apparently she was actually still alive in there, but sleeping. There were tubes and wires leading into and out of the oversized metal prison.

For a few days, Aster distracted herself from the horrors of the palace by contemplating the possibility of letting the 'Shulk' out, but was eventually forced to give up the idea. The metal container was well and truly sealed. Possibly, she might be able to cut through it with a torch… in several days. Since the sarcophagus was set into one wall of the Maestro's throne room, where Aster had previously thought it merely to be a peculiar decoration, it was hardly likely that she would be able to use a torch on it for that length of time without being noticed. She took out some of her annoyance at the matter by deciding that the Shulk and the Abominable creature were both stupid. Far stupider than her. They were stupid to attack the Maestro directly, however strong they might have been. What they should have done is found a way to sneak up on him, preferably while he was sleeping, and stuck an icepick into his ear.

That, at any rate, is what she would have done in their place. It was their stupidity that made them lose, and resulted in Aster's current situation. Satisfied with that line of reasoning, one afternoon, when the throne room was empty, Aster made her way over to the sarcophagus, and whispered towards it: "It's your own fault you're in there. If you're going to shoot an arrow at the King, you stupid cunt, don't miss."

Then she gave the metal container a kick, accomplishing nothing except to stub the toes on that foot. She hopped away and felt a bit stupid herself. Supposedly the 'Shulk' had been sleeping for years, so she could hardly hear Aster anyways, much less feel her kicking the metal prison. She wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. Obviously the possibility of the 'Shulk' bearing his child – which she probably could have done – was what the Maestro was warning her not to suggest. The absurdity of her made her nearly sick. The Maestro raped women to death – when he didn't have to, burned so-called 'criminals to death without a qualm, and did any manner of other horrible things. But getting his own cousin pregnant? Apparently that would be going quite too far.

About a month before she turned 18, Aster finally had her first menstruation. She had actually been very thankful for a long time, for her late development. She, at least, had not yet been able to end up like poor Betty 31, torn apart from the inside out by the Maestro's child. Now, it was possible that she could end up that way. She spent much time brooding on it. She knew the Maestro hated her, and it seemed like the sort of thing he would like to do to her.

The combination of the new possibility of a fatal pregnancy with a gamma child and being an unwilling witness to sadistic horrors eventually began to wear down on Aster's mental state. At times, it seemed she was in a fog, much like that which the codeine had caused in her. A few times she would wake up in the middle of the night, sit up in the dark, and think she was back at home in the Zoo, and that the whole horrible experience had been a nightmare. Other times, she thought none of it was real, including herself. Surely if she were a real person, such horrible things couldn't be happening to her.

More and more often, she thought that perhaps she was dead, and in Hell. It made sense. Hell could not be worse than what was happening to her, and she was a murderer. She had killed Betty 31, and murderers went to Hell. Perhaps the Maestro had killed her after she failed to save his unborn son, and part of her punishment in Hell was to not remember that she had died.

Autumn came. Most of the leaves fell off the trees that she could see from the barred windows of the palace. It seemed hot, despite the season. Perhaps the leaves had fallen early. Trees still grew in and around Dystopia, but they didn't seem healthy, and they grew more and more poorly every year. Or perhaps her expectations of what a tree should do had increased. Certainly after poor, dead Betty 31 had drawn her a picture of crowded trees and plants, like a pre-War illustration, that she claimed existed in and around Milwaukee, the trees in Dystopia seemed scanty, withered, and sickly and comparison.

Hot dusty winds blew, howling almost like winter weather. Occassionally it would drizzle, but never enough to settle the dust that filled the air. Sometimes there would be a flash of lightning, and a crack of thunder, but never very loud, as if the heat and dust were muffling the weather in some way.

It was on such a noisy night, that Aster was summoned before the Maestro. 'Summoned' in this case meaning that two guards found where she was working, trying to repair one of her improvised propane grills that she had put into the women's quarters, and promptly marched her to where the Maestro was sitting in his throne room.

Dread filled her belly at the sight in the throne room. The Maestro was sitting at a large table, eating something on a plate. Aster didn't recognize what it was, at first. Half the lights in the throne room were burned out, or broken, and the Maestro was illuminated mainly by the huge fire behind him, on which some mid-sized animal was roasting on a spit. Several of the guards were sitting at other tables. Something was odd about their expressions. They still looked cruel, but they also looked apprehensive and guilty for some reason.

Aster was used to fear. Her years in the Maestro's palace, and surviving the things that she had, had forced her to learn to function despite often being in a panic. Her heart was racing, and her chest heaving, but she forced herself to at least breathe quietly, and stand still. To distract herself, she looked at the roast in the fire. She had sometimes cooked rabbits that way, but this was far larger than a rabbit, though she couldn't make out in the dim light what it was. It had to be about 40 lbs, dressed. Probably 60 lbs while still alive. But what was it? The proportions were odd. Perhaps a mutation of some sort, from the Outside. Aster had always avoided eating mutant animals, worried about toxins and radiation, but the Maestro, with his ability to heal, probably didn't need to worry about such things. A mutant pig, maybe. There seemed to be a lot of fat both on the spitted roast, and the part the Maestro was eating.

The guards put her on the other side of the Maestro's table, about 10 feet away, so he could see her over the surface. The Maestro took another bite of what he was eating, wiped one greasy hand on his beard, and gestured towards her with the large piece of meat he was eating. Turned at another angle, Aster finally recognized what he was eating. Truthfully, she had recognized it the moment she had come in, but had suppressed the awareness.

_Oh dear God, not that._ Her heart raced faster, and she felt like vomiting again, the way she had the first time the Maestro had thrown a condemned criminal into the fireplace behind him. Her ears rang, and she felt faint. She looked at the fire, and to one side, and at the floor. Anywhere but straight ahead of her, at the Maestro and what he was holding.

"You!" The Maestro rumbled. "I've heard that you've been wandering around a lot lately. As if you thought you could come and go as you please. Is that what you think?"

"I…" Aster honestly couldn't remember much of what she had been doing the past few weeks. "I don't know."

"You don't know." The Maestro mocked her. "And now you're not kneeling. The way you are supposed to. Tell me, just where do you think you are? That you can do whatever you want?"

Aster thought about it, and gave the answer that had been making more and more sense to her lately. "I think… I'm in Hell."

The huge green tyrant found this vastly amusing for some reason. "Hell…" he chuckled, taking another bite of meat. "This is my Kingdom. But close enough, I guess. Do you think you can do whatever you want, in Hell?"

She shook her head in a panic, remembered at last that she was supposed to kneel, and did so. "No. I don't think that. Forgive me, my Lord."

"Better." The Maestro nodded as she kneeled. "Much better. Tell me, what's you're name?"

Aster thought. What was the right answer? "Betty. Betty 23…. My lord."

"Good. You've learned obedience." The Maestro took a larger bite of meat, swallowed it almost without chewing, belched, then set the remainder down on his plate. "There was a saying once, in an old book, from before the War. 'Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven'. Well, I reign in Hell, perhaps. And you serve in Hell. Now, what do you say to that?"

"I… don't know. Am I dead?"

"Are you dead?" The Maestro sneered. "None of us are DEAD. Look around you. Do we look dead? Well, other than the one in the fireplace. His father didn't have any cattle for me, so what was I supposed to do? Hmm? You tell me."

Aster quaked in a panic. "I… don't know…"

"You don't know." His voice grew more mocking. "The brilliant little zookeeper, so full of books. And so very useless. You didn't know anything when I needed you to save my son, and you don't know anything now. Do you? You're just a stupid, useless woman, aren't you?"

The series of questions confused her. "No. I mean, yes. I mean, I don't know. Whatever it is you say."

"Stupid." The Maestro nodded as if this had somehow settled something. "You're all stupid and treacherous. However clever and innocent you may seem at first."

He picked up the meat from his plate. _Long pig._ Aster forced herself to think in the euphemistic slang term, and took several more bites, glaring at Aster the whole while. He set it down again, and pointed one huge green finger at her.

"Take off your clothes, girl."

Aster had long since lost all modesty. She stepped out of the green dress as casually as if she were merely taking off a hat. The Maestro inspected her body, disapprovingly, looking from her head to her toe, as if trying to find one small part of it that met to his standards.

"The other women tell me that you finally started bleeding a few months ago." The Maestro said. "I thought perhaps you'd finally have some decent curves. That you'd look like a woman. But my God, look at you. Taller than most men. Huge feet. Shoulders wider than your hips. Don't get me started on your hair. Ugly brown color."

The Maestro inspected her for a few more moments, then shook his head. "You want to know what you look like? Honestly? You look like someone took a woman's body and fitted it over a man's skeleton. That's what you look like. Some kind of freak, almost."

"I'm sorry that I am ugly, my lord. I can't do anything about my height. Do you want me to bleach my hair?"

"Bleach your hair?" The Maestro snorted. "What good would that do? It would still be brown, underneath. Honestly, I have to say, that you are by far the ugliest woman I ever brought here. I don't know what I was thinking, to honor you like that."

_You think what you did to me, what I've been through, is an __honor?_ Aster thought in disbelief. She said nothing, and looked at the floor.

"Now your sister," The Maestro continued. "She was nothing like you. Lovely, long blond hair. Slender.. The right height. Small hands and feet. Nice curves, even as young as she was. The two of you were as different as, well, night and day."

_My sister… _Aster failed to notice the Maestro's use of past tense verbs in his statement. _It's only been four years… My God, she's younger than I was._

"Where…" Her voice trembled. "Where's my sister? Where's Thumb? Is she here?"

"She was" The Maestro's smirk became terribly cruel. "Like I said, the two of you were as different as night and day. You're still alive… she didn't survive the night with me."

"**NO! THUMB!" **Grief and coldness warred in her chest. "**WHERE'S THUMB! WHERE'S MY SISTER?!"**

"How the hell should I know?" The Maestro snarled in irritation. "Somewhere in the charnel pit. I don't keep a fucking record of what bodies land where. If you want her, why don't you climb down and get her?"

Fear joined grief and coldness. She wanted to find Thumb's body. She _should _find Thumb's body. But she was afraid of heights under the best of circumstances, and that horrible pit terrified her. She stood, gaping and looking stupid for several moments, until the Maestro finally made a disgusted noise.

"Fine. Don't go. Why don't you just leave?" There was a sadistic glimmer in his eyes.

"Leave?" Aster didn't understand. She was a prisoner here.

"Leave!" The Maestro pointed behind her. "Are you so stupid that you don't understand simple English? Get the hell out. You're good for nothing. You're useless, and ugly. And the other women keep complaining about you. I don't need you here gobbling up my food and scaring them. So get the hell out."

"Out…" The concept was unthinkable. "What… should I do?"

"Do I look like your Father? Go ask him." The sadistic glimmer grew stronger. "If he's still alive."

"Father…" Aster hadn't thought about her father, or about Thumb, in so long. "What did you do to my father? Where is he?"

"That Zookeeper?" The Maestro grinned cruelly. "Back at his home in the zoo, where I left him, I suppose. But he seemed very upset when I took your sister the other night, and said it was to replace the one that died."

"But…" Aster couldn't comprehend a lie of such pointless cruelty. "I'm not dead."

Of course, there was no way her father could know that.

"Go tell your father that." Suggested the Maestro. "If he's still alive. He was sobbing about having nothing left to live for, the last I saw him."

Leave… it was a foreign, nearly unthinkable concept. But there it was, in front of her. And she had to hurry. If it wasn't already too late. She reached down to pick up the dress that the Maestro had demanded she take off.

"Leave the clothes." Ordered the Maestro. "You came here with nothing, and you'll leave with nothing. You've done absolutely nothing of use while you were living off my generosity, and I'll not have you stealing my clothes, any more than I'll have you eating my food any longer, Zookeeper."

_I didn't come here with nothing. I came with Tony Tiger. _Aster thought. But Tony Tiger was long gone, offered as an inadequate penance to the woman she had murdered. And now, in the same pit her sister was in. Aster turned, shuffling away, and feeling ashamed. A good sister, a brave sister, would have insisted on going down into the charnel pit to find Thumb's body. But she was nothing but a worthless coward, always saving her own skin. Not a hero, like the ones in the Hall of Fallen Heroes, many of whom had died fighting the Maestro. Because she was afraid.

She was afraid of heights.

She was afraid of the charnel pit.

She was afraid of the Maestro changing his mind.

It was the last thought that got her moving. What if he _did _change his mind, in the next few minutes? What if he killed her and put her body on a spit? Or worse yet, did so _without _killing her first?

It was the last thought that got her moving. Not daring to move too fast, terrified of moving too slowly, she shuffled out of the throne room, down the hallway. Aster was worried that it was a trick of some kind, that she would be allowed to get just so far down the Hallway, then the Maestro, running far faster than she could ever hope to do, would suddenly come after her, seizing her in one huge hand, and doing God only knew what to her.

She saw the main doorway of the palace. It _looked _unguarded, but surely that was a trick. Surely, a whole legion of guards, or the Maestro himself, would be standing just outside, ready to seize her and laugh at her foolishness the moment she stepped through the doorway.

She paused at the threshold, not knowing from which way the inevitable recapture would come. From within, or without. But surely freedom couldn't be. She didn't even want it, bought with such a price. Thumb. Her father.

The thought of her father got her moving. If there were a chance that she _was _being let go, after all these years, then she had to get home. To her father. If it weren't too late.

_Please, God, let it not be too late._

Aster stepped out the huge doorway to the palace, steeling herself for the recapture that she was certain to come at any moment.

It never came. No-one was there. The only sound was the unseasonably warm wind, howling through nearly bare trees and blowing the branches, the dust, and her hair. It chilled her, despite the temperature. She coughed, struggling to see through the dust and the darkness, then forced herself to stop. Someone might be out there, hiding, waiting for her, and they would hear her coughing.

Cautiously, crouching so as to lower her profile, she skulked through the square in front of the palace, past the heads on their high spikes. She couldn't read the signs in the darkness, and couldn't really remember who they had been, or what exactly they had done to offend the Maestro. There had been so many, lately, who had been executed for 'crimes' against the Maestro that a few, earlier 'criminals' and executions seemed unimportant now.

Aster still moved slowly, crouching as low as she could. Her eyes darted as she wondered from what direction the recapture she was certain was imminent would come from. From the palace? From behind that line of trees over to her right? From one of the alleys? Surely they wouldn't just let her go, after all these years. Guilt welled up again. And fear. She not only didn't want freedom, at such a price, she wasn't sure what she would do with it. Still, an animal instinct for survival kept her moving. She went down the street, past some buildings, ignoring a surprised noise from someone in an upper story window who saw her naked form go by. She ignored the first few side roads, then, keeping her body in the shadows of the buildings, turned into the fourth one.

Still, no signs of pursuit or followers.

Aster moved faster now. Which was not very fast. Her feet were soft, from feminine shoes and the smooth floors of the palace, and walking on pavement and gravel was painful. She minced her way along as fast as she could, looking behind her every few seconds for signs she was being chased, but never saw any. After nearly half a mile, she came across a rubbish pile. There were some torn, filthy scraps of canvas. Not enough to cover her body, but she wrapped several pieces around her feet, and tied them as tightly as she could. Poor protection, but better than bare feet. With a few layers of cloth between her skin and the harsh road, she moved faster now.

She got colder. She had thought it unseasonably warm, but it was still autumn. The howling wind sucked the heat from her body. She went past a few more rubbish piles, but failed to find anything she could use to keep herself warm, unless she wanted to make a fire, and there wasn't time to do that. As it was, it might already be too late.

_Please, God. Let it not be too late._

It took Aster nearly two hours to get to the gates of the Bronx Zoo. She was shivering badly, by the time she stepped through. As she did, she jumped, suddenly thinking that if she had not been recaptured near the palace, perhaps it was only because the Maestro and his guards meant to recapture her _here._

And yet, nobody was there. Despite that, as soon as Aster entered the Zoo, in fact, as soon as she had even gotten _near _it, she could tell something was wrong. It was quiet. Far too quiet. For far too long. Even at night, in the zoo, some animal or the other would give out a howl, or a grunt, or some sort of animal noise every few minutes or so. And with their keen hearing and smell, some of them should have awoken at her approach and reacted.

But there was nothing. As Aster walked through the zoo, she saw the reason why. The moon shone only dimly though the dust, and thin, occasionally drizzling clouds, but it was bright enough to see at least some details. Enough details to show her why the zoo was so silent.

The animals were gone.

And had apparently been gone for some time. Branches, leaves, and short shrubbery were scattered around the outdoor enclosures. The first two should have been cleaned up by her father and the men who worked for him, and the latter ought to have been either eaten or trampled by whatever animal lived inside the enclosure.

Aster began running, looking into first one enclosure, then another, in a panic. Surely there had to be some animals left!

But there were none.

She ran through the buildings that held the smaller animals. The World of Reptiles, and the Mouse House. The glass was broken, obviously some time ago judging by the leaves that had blown in and covered the shards. Aster cut her foot on one bit of glass that was under some leaves but didn't notice. There was no clue as to what had happened to the snakes, or lizards, or marmosets, or vampire bats.

"Please!" She shouted as she ran, leaving bloody footprints behind her.

"Please!" She wasn't sure if she was calling to the animals or to her father. "Where are you?"

She ran to her house, still screaming.

"Father! Please! Where are you? Where are the animals? Please? Somebody? It's me! Me! Aster!"

_It's Betty 23. _Came the Maestro's mocking voice. But that was just her imagination.

"Please, please little animals." Aster started crying, and ran out of the house. She felt like a child having a horrible nightmare. "Please, this isn't real. Please… you're all hiding on me somewhere. Please, this is just a trick. Please don't hide. Please come out. Please, little animals. Come out by Aster."

There were a few noises and squeaks in the grass and trees of assorted wild creatures, but no sign of the zoo animals. Or her father.

Despite running around the zoo several times, Aster never found the former. She did, however, eventually find the latter. She looked back in the house several times, going upstairs and downstairs, and flinging open the door to the closets. She looked in the supply sheds, and even the small shed where Wolfkiller had brought his paid women, so long ago. But there was no sign of life in any of them, aside from spiders and rats. The whole zoo reminded her of the dark basement where she and Thumb had hid, once upon a time, from two green titans battling eachother.

"THUMB!" she screamed. "FATHER!"

There was no answer.

Finally, Aster went into the medical building, where sick animals were treated, and surgery was done. There, she finally found her father.

Hanging from a rope, his silhouette obvious against the large windows.

"NO!"

"NO! FATHER! NO!"

There was a fallen chair by him. Aster righted it, and got onto it, trying to lift up her father's body. Knowing, as she did so, that she was far too late. Live bodies did not smell of death. She lifted it up anyways, holding it with one arm while she used her free hand to try to loosen the noose. To no avail. Her grip slipped, and she fell from the chair onto the floor, cracking her knee painfully.

Fortunately, she didn't break any bones. But it still hurt. She lay on the floor in pain, sobbing for several minutes, then looked back up. A despairing figure, a slave given freedom she never asked for, or even dared hope for, at the cost of what she had thought all these years that she was buying, was saving, by sacrificing herself to slavery, to the horrible lusts of a monster.

Her sister.

Her father.

Her Zoo.

None of it had been worth it. She hadn't saved what she thought she had. It had all been some sort of horrible trick.

Aster sat for the rest of the night unmoving. A single, barely living figure, below her dead father, in the hollow, dead shell of an empty zoo. Alive, when she should have been dead. When she wished she were dead, like every person and animal she ever cared about was.

She had never been so alone.


	18. Chapter 18

Chapter 18. Empty Wilderness

Aster sat below her father's body all night and most of the next morning. The weather got colder and damper, and the howling wind and dust settled down. She looked at the shadow the sun cast of her father's body on the wall of the medical building, as it moved slowly from right to left. She couldn't bring herself to move, to do anything, despite the cold, the pain, the hunger, and the grief.

_What should I do?_ She asked herself.

A cruel memory from the previous night answered.

"_Do I look like your Father? Go ask him." _It was what the Maestro had answered, when she had asked him that question.

"Father…?" Aster's voice echoed off cold walls, heard by no-one. Again, she heard the Maestro's mocking voice in her mind.

"_If he's still alive."_

But her father wasn't alive. He was hanging there, at the end of a rope. So many were dead. Her father. Thumb. The Zoo animals. Betty 31. All dead. And she was still alive. Why? She ran to the door and gazed out at the dead, abandoned Zoo.

"WHY!" She cried out to the emptiness. "Why am I still alive?"

No answer, except the flap of a few frightened birds taking wing from a nearby tree.

"Why didn't you kill me?" She wasn't sure if she was asking her father or the Maestro. But neither one could hear her to give an answer.

The only one who could decide what she should do, was herself. And she didn't know. Everything was broken, and there was no way to fix it, no routine, no work to be done.

_I have to do my job._ Aster thought. If only she knew what that job was. Always before, she knew what was supposed to be done, even if she often hadn't liked it. Certainly she hadn't liked most of the things that had happened to her, and that she had had to do, in the Maestro's palace. But at least she knew there what to do. Cook. Clean. Act as a decoration. Get raped. Keep herself alive, and don't annoy the Maestro. But what to do now? Put out food that was probably long gone for zoo animals that had long since been served up on the Maestro's table? Clean up nonexistent droppings? All the old jobs, from the Maestro's palace and from her childhood were gone.

Well, maybe there were new jobs. She had to do _something. _The Maestro didn't want her leeching off him any more, and she couldn't just sit naked on the floor forever under her father's body. For one thing, he was starting to smell pretty bad.

She would start by burying him. She guessed that was what children did for their parents. Aster left the medical building and went over to her house. None of her old clothes fit her, and she didn't want to wear any of her father's clothes. She sighed, wrapped one of her old bathrobes around herself, then went to a supply shed and got out an old, dusty Zookeeper's uniform that was folded on a shelf. Size large. It fit. There wasn't any underwear, but she put it on anyways, along with some cracked boots. Then she went back to the house, and got a large blanket and a small knife from the kitchen. The blanket had once been brown, but was faded to a sort of dark tan color. She put the knife in one pocket of the Zookeeper's uniform, brought the blanket back to the medical building, and spread it out on the floor under the dead body. Not wanting to step on the chair her father had used to hand himself, she pushed it out of the way, and shoved a small table near his body instead.

Aster climbed on the table, holding her breath. Closer to her dead father, the smell was far worse. She turned away, trying not to see what his face looked like, and breathed shallowly through her mouth. She took the knife and began cutting at the rope. It was awkward, doing so while standing at an angle to avoid the worst of the sight and smell of what had happened. She also had to do so one-handed, holding the rope with her other hand to steady herself and keep it tight. Possibly she could have held her father's body up with both hands, once the rope was cut, had she been able to use both hands. Or at least have lowered him down slowly. But she only had the two hands, and both of them were needed for the job, there was nobody to help her.

So, when she was nearly all the way through the rope, the remaining few strands parted with a dull 'snap', and the body - _her father -_ fell clumsily onto the blanket below, the limbs sprawled out awkwardly. She couldn't even bring herself to touch him, her own father. It was too horrible to think of the living man, the man who had taught her all about animals and the zoo, reduced to this _thing, _this decomposing sprawled out puppet. Aster got a small towel, once used to wipe up some of the worse messes on the surgical and examining tables, and wrapped her hand in it, before straightening out her father's body the best she could. Then she wrapped the blanket around it several times, and used some pins to close it shut.

She looked at the pins for a moment. Such a simple thing, much like the matches she had tried not to waste as a child. It brought back memories of her lighting a lantern with a coal from the kitchen stove, in her and Thumb's room, so many years ago. But no more matches were being made. And no more pins. The world was broken. There were pins being made a really long time ago, they talked about pins in her old fairy tale books, that were stories written hundreds of years before the war. But no more. No more pins. No more matches. No more zoo animals. No more father. No more Thumb. The War had only begun the destruction of the world. The Maestro was finishing it. Bit by bit, things were being broken, and buried, and eaten. Perhaps, someday, there would be nothing at all left, and maybe it would actually be _better _that way. With the destruction finally finished, and nothing left, once and for all. After all, what else, could there be, other than the suffering of the people under the Maestro's rule while the destruction was still an ongoing process?

_There's Wisconsin. And the Vampire. And maybe Iceland._

She dismissed the thought, though she knew she shouldn't. She would have liked it if the world could still live. If there could still be animals and plants, like there were in Wisconsin. And maybe Iceland. She knew, perhaps, how to save it. But she couldn't do it by herself. And there was nobody to help her. She was all alone, a little ghost Aster haunting an empty zoo.

Besides… the price of saving the world was terribly high. Even if there had been people to help her, she didn't know if she could pay it. Or if anybody could pay it. Of course, there had been those who had in the past, but Aster had no delusions about her own cowardice and selfishness. She was no hero. Little wonder she liked animals. She was just like them. Always worried about herself, and her own survival, first. Her time in the Maestro's palace had made that fact (if very little else) quite clear to her. It was why she had killed Betty 31. It was why she had let a few of the other women die in that last, terrible year, who could likely have been saved by the antibiotics she had hidden away. It was why she had left her own poor sister, Thumb, in the Maestro's horrible charnel pit rather than even trying to find her body after the Maestro had raped her to death. How old had Thumb been? 13? Younger than she had been.

Aster shook herself out of her thoughts. Reflecting on her guilt did no good. She knew she would have done things exactly the same, if she had to do them over again. She took the blanket her father's body was wrapped in by one end and began dragging it out of the medical building, while thinking of where to bury him. Not by the tiger enclosure. The tigers reminded her of the Maestro. Nor by the pond, either. There were still some animals in the zoo. Not the real Zoo animals, but wild rodents and birds, and she didn't want to contaminate the water. Finally, she decided to bury him in front of the house. It was where he had lived, all his life, so maybe it was fitting that he rest there. Aster didn't want to live in the house anymore, anyways.

She got a shovel out of a shed, and began digging. It was not a good grave. Shovelling by hand is heavy work, and the deeper the hole, the harder the work becomes. Aster was strong for a woman, but nowhere near as strong as a man her height would have been. Plus, the parched ground, obviously not watered in some time by either man or nature, was very hard to dig through. She got sweaty and dirty, and had to stop a few times to get some water. It took her most of the afternoon to make an uneven looking hole about two and a half feet deep. Then she pulled the blanket-wrapped body again, and slid it, as neatly as she could, into the hole. It fit tightly, but actually surprisingly well. Or perhaps not so surprisingly. Flesh was mallable, even in the dead, and her father's body was past the point of rigor mortis.

Aster didn't know if she was supposed to say a prayer after the body was put into the grave, or after it was buried. She didn't like looking at the hole, like a mouth, especially with the shadows of the bare trees making jagged, tooth-like shapes around the edge, so she decided on the latter. The mouth-like appearance of the open grave scared her, like it might try to suddenly snatch her with sharp teeth, and drag her, kicking and screaming, still alive, into the grave with her dead father. She took the shovel and began putting all the dirt back in, on top of the body. Hopefully, it was deep enough. She knew that graves were supposed to be six feet deep, but it had taken her hours to get it as deep as it was. If she tried to make a proper, six-foot deep grave, it would probably take her three days, at least.

It was sunset by the time she filled the grave back in. Aster stomped the dirt down as hard as she could, justifying it to the rational side of her mind that she wanted to make sure that no scavenging vermin dug up her father's body, but knowing somewhere inside her that she was afraid of that open mouth-like grave somehow spitting out the dirt if she didn't pack it in tightly enough, and then doing something utterly horrible, like spewing her father's body back out of it like an unwanted morsel. Or waiting until she went past, unawares, and seizing her with sharp, black, fangs made of shadows.

Finally, the dirt was packed down as tightly and smoothly as she could manage it. She needed something to mark the grave. A stone monument was out of the question, she lacked the tools and patience to chisel writing out of something that hard. And she had no nicely formed stone shape anyways. Instead, she got a small, light grey boulder, about the size of her head, from a decorative garden, and put that there. Then she got some boards and began carving writing in them with the same knife she had used to cut down her father's body:

_**Joshua Aversa**_

_**My Beloved Father**_

_**The Last Zookeeper**_

Aster nailed a thinner, wooden stake to the large board, and stuck it in the ground, as deeply as she could manage. She looked at the sign for a minute, then got another board and carved that as well:

_**Tina Aversa**_

_**My Sister**_

_**I am sorry.**_

Aster went and got several small stones, each about as big as her fist, carrying them by holding up the bottom of her shirt to make a sort of pocket, and pressed them into the dirt of the grave to make a stone cross. It was better than no stone decoration. Besides, perhaps the holy symbol would keep the grave from doing something horribly unnatural due to it not being a proper six feet deep.

Finally, she couldn't really delay praying any more. It was nearly dark now, the sun slipping below the horizon. Aster knelt down on the grave and folded her hands, trying to think of a good prayer. All the ones she knew were inadequate. Just as her penance of Tony Tiger had been inadequate for her murder of Betty 31, and her carving her sister's name on a board had been inadequate for her failure to go get her body.

"Father… Thumb…" Aster sniffed and started crying. "I guess you're both together in heaven, now. Maybe there's a Zoo, there. I'm still here. I don't know if you can see me down here…"

She thought for a bit. "Maybe not. I'm not a very good daughter, or sister, or Zookeeper. Maybe that's why I'm still down here. I told the Maestro yesterday that I was in Hell, and maybe that's right. Maybe the whole world here is Hell. It's like I've heard the preachers say from the Bible, that after the end of the World, the Devil comes to rule for a thousand years, and all the good people like you get taken away by God, and the bad people like me have to stay here with the Devil. Because that's what he is. The Devil. The Devil can't be any worse, anyways."

Aster thought some more. "Anyway, I guess that's all. I buried you, father, but there's nothing else I can do. I couldn't bury Thumb, and I can't take care of the Zoo. There is no Zoo any more. Pretty soon, maybe no more me, and no more anything. Then maybe God will start over, someday."

It was a bad prayer, but Aster didn't know all that much about religion. She'd only been to church a few times, for Christmas and Easter, and heard what some half-mad preachers had said in the streets of Dystopia.

It was dark now, and getting cold. Aster wanted to get away from the grave, and find somewhere to curl up in a ball and sleep, so she could forget about all the horrible things that had happened for a while. She didn't want to go in the house to sleep, though. It wasn't a home, anymore. Not with her family dead. It was just another tomb, in a world full of all too many of them. She needed shelter, though. And warmth.

Reluctantly, she went into the house just long enough to get a few thick blankets. Then, making her way though the Zoo, by the dimly reflected lights in Dystopia, she went into the Mouse House. One of the broken enclosures, that read 'Common Vampire Bat' had hardly any glass left in front. She looked at it for a moment. She remembered going through the Mouse House with Thumb, long ago, telling her all the facts she had memorized about the animals. But they were all gone. Even the bats were gone. Aster couldn't imagine the Maestro eating something as small as a bat. Perhaps her father had let them go, in hopes that they would survive. Though that didn't seem likely. Vampire bats came from South America or Mexico or somewhere like that.

Aster got a rock and knocked the remaining few shards out of the front of the enclosure. She cleaned out the branches, rocks, litter, and other objects that were part of the habitat for the bats that used to live there. Then she climbed inside, wrapped herself up in the blankets, and went to sleep, a would-be Zookeeper living in one of her own animal cages. While she slept, a few mice, and once a scrawny coyote, scurried through the empty Mouse House. The mice quickly scurried out again, looking for places to hide from the weather, but the coyote paused several feet outside the former Vampire Bat enclosure to sniff the strange scents coming from inside. There was a faint smell of some small creature, unfamiliar to the coyote, and much faded with time, so that it didn't much concern the canine scavenger. There was the far stronger smell of carrion, clinging to Aster from her father's body, which the Coyote found very tempting to investigate, but there was also the smell of live Man. In these times, a lot of humans would eat a coyote, if they were able to kill it, and the remaining ones had gotten very wary. Humans could kill at a far distance with things the Coyote didn't really understand. It was best to keep away. Perhaps there would be more carrion, elsewhere, easier to get. Often, there was carrion near a very large, shiny den that many of the humans lived in. By taking a circuitous route around the collection of crowded dens where humans lived, perhaps the coyote would be able to see if there was anything edible there tonight.

It's mind made up, the Coyote yipped once, then ran out of the Mouse House. The sound made Aster waken slightly. She pulled her blankets more tightly around her, tucked one corner over her face, which had gotten a little cold, then went back to sleep.

The trouble with sleeping to escape problems is the same as the trouble with many of the other solutions that human beings have resorted to for countless thousands of years, including taking drugs, breaking things, and blaming others. Which is that you can do it for just so long, and it doesn't make your problems go away. Once you're done sleeping, getting high, vandalizing things, and punishing everyone in your immediate vicinity for things which might not be their fault, you are still faced with the same problems, plus - very often - addition new problems caused by the latter three false solutions.

Distraction works slightly better. Not in that it solves problems, but in that there is an endless variety of ways in which human beings can distract themselves, ranging from entertainment to education to work. Most of which at least do not cause additional new problems, and some of which at least may be slightly constructive.

When Aster woke from her sleep, she crawled out of the small, crypt like enclosure, shook her arms and legs out, and at first indulged herself for a few hours in one of the more useless solutions, which was blaming others for her current problems. She walked back and forth in the Mouse House, sometimes crying, sometimes screaming, weeping about her family, the things that had happened to her, and hurling violent obscenities of hatred and revenge. As she paced, she violently kicked at the leaves, branches, pebbles, and any other pieces of litter that happened to be in her way. Occasionally she would pick up a more solid piece of litter and hurl it against the wall of the Mouse House - or into one of the empty habitats - while fuming over those people she felt were responsible for all her problems, including the Maestro, the Hulk (who was actually a younger version of the Maestro, therefore just as bad), Paul Rasse, most of the other guards in the palace, most of the women in the palace, Rick Jones, the Shulk, and anyone else she could think of.

It was a change from her younger years that she no longer blamed Daniel Wolfkiller for what had happened to her. After all, he had helped her several times, and from what he had said, the Maestro had done to his wife the same thing that he had done to Betty 31 - with much the same results. Then apparently forced the stable master to work for him as well. Aster still did not much approve of the man's drinking and whoring, but compared to most of the other things going on in the Maestro's palace, drinking and whoring was rather little more than an eccentric hobby in comparison. And perhaps it wasn't her place to tell Wolfkiller how he should deal with the problems the Maestro had caused in his life, any more than it would be his place to tell her not to kick and throw things.

The thought of kicking and throwing things brought Aster back to the actual activity of doing so. It didn't solve the problems that she had, any of the horrible things that had happened to her, that had been _done _to her, but at least she didn't have to think about them so hard. And it was actually slightly constructive in that over a few hours, her kicking and throwing of objects got the worst of the litter that had accumulated in the Mouse House _out_ of the building, and moved the rest of it closer to the walls, so that there was actually a clear path, where visitors to the Zoo could have walked. If there had been any visitors to the Zoo. Or any animals left to look at.

The clear path made Aster decide to purposefully do even better than her tantrum had inadvertently done. She went to a small supply room in the Mouse House and got out a broom. It was actually of Post-War construction, made of willow twigs stuck through a hand planed board, with a fairly straight branch for a handle. Aster pushed it back and forth, cleaning up the litter. Sometimes, she would grab it as if it were a sword, and jab it violently in the air, imagining poking an actual sword or spear into some vulnerable part of the people she hated most, such as into Paul Rasse's eyes, or right up the Maestro's ass.

Well, the Maestro was too strong for her to ever hurt, but it's too bad she didn't have Paul Rasse here alone, in the Zoo. With the home territory advantage, it wouldn't be too hard for her to disable him by shooting arrows into his arms and legs. Then she'd tie him up and hang him upside-down. Right in the medical building, from the same beam her poor father had hung himself from. Then she'd cut him up, a piece at a time. Using a small scalpel, cauterizing the wounds, and making sure he got fluids, it would take him a very satisfyingly long time to die. Days, or even weeks, maybe. Long enough for him to have a good long time to reflect over his wretched life of evil things he had done to her, and everyone else. But especially to her.

Probably she'd castrate him first, and not with any anesthetic either. He could think about that, while he spent the next few weeks dying. Maybe she'd find some old bottles, somewhere, break them up, and force him to eat all the little sharp pieces of glass. That's what he got. And he would have to eat them. All animals in the zoo had to eat whatever food they were given. Refusing to eat was not allowed, her father had told her that, once. A long time ago. The zoo animals were good, and got good food to eat. Sometimes they would even change the food if they thought the animal might like something else better, but eating broken glass was all a stinking horrible rapist like Rasse deserved. He could eat broken up bottles for a couple weeks, and it would be rather interesting to see whether he died from being cut on the inside by _them, _or being cut on the outside by _her. _Too bad there weren't any publishers and medical papers any more, the way there had been before the war. She could write a short book about it. _A Comparison of Simultaneous Internal and External Lacerations._ Maybe put it on Doctor Llewellyn's bookshelf, next to _Fundamentals of Biochemistry _and all the other books.

Using the broom, it didn't take long for Aster to get most of the debris cleaned up out of the Mouse House. That was better. Now there were no branches to trip on, leaves to crunch underfoot, or broken glass from the front of the empty habitats to inconvenience anyone who visited the Zoo. Aster looked around. Her father would be proud of the clean floor. She was hungry, now. Was there food in the house? She wasn't sure, but she didn't want to go in there. Maybe she could find something else to eat. There was always something. Most of the time.

The Zoo had several nut trees. Once, long ago, before the War, trees had been planted in the Zoo just to be decorative, but now, they were only planted if they had a use. Most of the trees produced fruits or nuts. There were a lot of apple trees (though some of them were really crabapples, though you could still eat them) and even more walnut and hickory trees. The hickory trees were also good for making wooden things, or smoking, though it was important not to chop down too many trees or there would be no nuts next year. Then again, Aster didn't think she'd even be alive next year. But for now, there were a lot of nuts on the ground. Aster had once gathered up as many as she could in the fall, and they stored them in barrels in their attic, to eat during the winter. She didn't want to go into her house, or her attic, but the other empty habitats in the Mouse House might make a good place to put them.

Aster took a rock, then went to the nearest hickory tree, where the light tan nuts were littering the ground. She sat on the ground with her rock, gathered up several nuts in a pile, and began smashing them. She picked the meat out of the shells and popped the pieces into her mouth. Some of the nuts had worms inside, hickory weevils, but she wasn't hungry enough to eat them, so she just made a face and flung them into the grass.

"Ought to smash the Maestro." She said once, when frustrated by a particularly hard nut. She really needed a bigger rock, especially if she was going to crack walnuts. Or maybe she could get a hammer out of one of the sheds, to get better leverage. But not now. Maybe tomorrow. She thought some more about people she wanted to hurt, and added, "Smash that jerk, Rasse, too."

There was a lot of protein and fats in the nuts, and pretty soon she got full. She stood up and noticed a few squirrels running around with some of the nuts. She was actually late in collecting them, she thought. She wasn't quite sure what the date was, but her father would have scolded her for letting the squirrels get the nuts. In fact, maybe she could shoot a squirrel later, or tomorrow, and eat it. But for now she had to gather the nuts, or her father would be very disappointed.

Then Aster remembered that her father was dead. He couldn't be disappointed any more. She sat down and sniffed, remembering how she and her father and Thumb used to put the nuts onto big metal trays, and hold them over a fire for a while. That killed the worms like Hickory Weevils that were inside, so they wouldn't eat their way out of the nut and make everything gross. They would have nuts late at night, when they played games, and lots of them for Christmas, sometimes even with maple sugar or honey glazed on them. But now she didn't have a fireplace. That was in their house. And she didn't want to go in there. Well, there was another one in the medical building. But she didn't want to go in there, either.

Aster finished sniffling, wiped her face, and noticed she was grubby. But she didn't feel like washing. Washing reminded her of the Maestro's palace. The first thing they did when she was brought there, was give her a bath. It seemed she was always washing there, at first because being dirty was dangerous since it might have made the Maestro angry, and later (during that last terrible year) because she had been worried about infection from the dead bodies and overflowing sewage that had littered the palace. Well, now she was out of the palace, and she didn't have to take a bath. The Zoo was littered and overgrown, but it wasn't polluted with corpses and sewage. She didn't have to take a bath if she didn't want to. Maybe she'd never take a bath again, so there!

Using her hands, Aster rubbed the worst of the dirt off her face and arms, then got some sacks and a hammer from one of the sheds. She began filling the sacks with nuts. Some with hickory nuts, some with the walnuts. The walnuts weren't actually real walnuts, but something else, she couldn't quite remember what they were, just now. Her father had said that before the War, real walnuts had had much thinner shells, and more meat inside each one. He showed her a picture of them in some books, so she knew they were real. But those trees were delicate, and now were nowhere to be found.

Like so much else in the world, like her father, her sister, and all the Zoo animals. Everything good and beautiful was gone, and there was nothing left but the ugly scrub that somehow managed to survive.

The remaining nut trees, however, were good producers, despite not having been irrigated for at least that year. And perhaps not even for a few years before that. Aster had no way of knowing when the Zoo had been destroyed. For all she knew, the Maestro had begun eating his way through the Zoo the very day after he stole her away from it. She, herself, might even have been actually unknowingly _eating _the Zoo animals the whole time she was at the Maestro's palace. There was no way to know. The meat she had eaten, and sometimes helped cook, had been butchered and sliced long before she ever saw it, so she didn't really know for sure what species anything had been. Other than, of course, the whole roasts that the Maestro was fond of. Including that last, horrible one, that had actually been a little boy._ Somebody's _little boy. Their son. Their only son, maybe, and the Maestro ate him because their parents didn't have 'enough' cattle for him. As if anyone could _ever _have enough to satisfy the insatiable. Satisfying the Maestro was like trying to 'satisfy' a fire. It couldn't be done. The more you fed either one, the more, and faster, it would consume.

"Poor little boy." Aster sniffed as she dragged a sack of nuts back to the Mouse House. It was heavy and she had to pause to rest. "What did a little boy like you ever do to the Maestro, to deserve that? What did I ever do? What did **ANY** of us ever do to him!?"

She was screaming now. The thought that she might have, unknowingly, been eating the Zoo animals during the past four years made her feel almost like a cannibal. "What the hell did any of us ever do to you, you bastard, that you treat us like that? Raping, and eating, and killing your way through what's left of the world! Why? For what? What could any of us have ever done to you? Nothing! None of us could ever possibly hurt you! And you don't have to do it! You can change back! I saw it! And now look what you've done! Ate your way through the last Zoo! All those species! Gone! Forever! Why? So you can stay ten feet tall and eat like a pig forever?! Because that's what you are! A pig! All men are pigs, but you're the biggest pig of all! A big, giant, green pig, that does nothing but eat and rape and kill people and say 'Oink'! Here! Have some nuts, you pig! I did all the work, but why don't you just eat them, the way you've eaten and wrecked everything else!?"

She picked up the sack of nuts and threw it as hard as she could. The top flew open, and several nuts fell out. Feeling ashamed and stupid, Aster gathered them back up again, and brought them into the Mouse house. She set them in front of an enclosure, then went back outside to get the hammer, which she used to knock the rest of the glass out of the broken front. She cleaned the animal litter and decoration out of the habitat (which read 'Pygmy Marmoset) the way she had with the 'Common Vampire Bat' habitat where she had slept the previous night. Then, carefully, she tied the top of the sack shut, and put it up into the habitat. The floor was dirty again, now, from the stuff she had taken out of the habitat, and she had to get the broom back out to sweep it. Having cleaned it up once, Aster was not inclined to let the Mouse House get back into the abominable state it had been in the previous night.

Aster gathered up several more sacks of nuts, and put them into the Pygmy Marmoset enclosure, where she had been stacking them the past few days. Once, bringing a large sack of hickory nuts in, she saw a squirrel jump out, and upon inspection, noticed that it had been gnawing on one of the sacks. That would never do. Aster thought about it, then left the Mouse House and went a distance away in the Zoo, where there was a shed with several large boards. She took a number of them, along with a saw and screwdriver, and put them in a stack in the Mouse House. Then she went to another shed, where there were some pre-war metal fixtures (scavenged from ruined buildings in what had once been old New York city), and selected two hinges, a 'hook and eye' set, a bunch of long nails, and some large, rusty screws.

Aster went back to the Mouse House, used one of the nails to etch lines on the boards, and spent the next few hours making a new, wooden front for the 'Pygmy Marmoset' enclosure. There was a square door on top, about 18 inches square, that she could open to put sacks of nuts in (or take them out), and close securely (at least against squirrels) with the hook and eye.

By that time it was getting close to sunset, and Aster started to feel hungry again. She didn't feel like any more nuts, so wandered around the Zoo, looking for something else to eat. There were some small apples, barely an inch in diameter, practically crabapples, so she picked them, along with some bunches of small grapes. There wasn't much to the grapes, but they were sweet (if very tart) and she was thirsty. She went to the pond and actually drank a few cupped handfuls of water. She knew she probably shouldn't have done that, she should have boiled it, but she didn't want to go in the house to use the stove, and she had spent all her current mental and physical reserves on making a door for her nut cache, and couldn't really find the gumption to come up with an alternate way of boiling the water. Besides, the water looked fairly clean, not scummy like it was during the hot part of summer. And the wild animals like the squirrels drank it unboiled all the time.

Aster went to bed in the 'Common Vampire Bat' enclosure, falling asleep as she munched handfuls of stunted wild fruit. She thought vaguely that maybe she should put a marker for the poor boy that the Maestro had eaten somewhere, but didn't know where. She didn't know who his family was, or even his name. Probably there would be other boys. And girls. And men and women. She couldn't imagine the Maestro suddenly stopping what he was doing. He wouldn't listen to reason, and no-one could make him.


	19. Chapter 19

Chapter 19. Anima

The next day, Aster got up in the morning, and despite being nervous about the raw pond water she had drunk, felt fine. It seemed good, like the _proper _thing to do, to be doing at least some of the chores that needed to be done for winter, and cleaning up at least one building of the zoo. She gathered up more nuts that day, and the day after, and eventually had to get more wood to seal off more of the habitats in the Mouse House from the marauding squirrels. Or maybe it wasn't a Mouse House any more, but an Aster House. She didn't live in a regular people house any more, but in one of the Zoo cages. So maybe she was a Zoo animal. The only Zoo animal. The last Zoo animal in the world, without even a Zookeeper to help take care of her.

Sometimes she would stop doing her chores, and go to look at the grave where she had buried her father (and made markers both for him and for Thumb). Once, after a rare, fairly heavy rain, the markers were a little tilted, so she went and got the hammer and pounded them in deeper. There wasn't much else she could do. She got sad when she went to the grave, but thought she was supposed to. Besides, she needed to check it every now and then to make sure it hadn't done something weird in a supernatural like way, because it wasn't a proper six feet deep.

Over a few weeks, Aster became aware that there were, in fact, still animals in the Zoo. The overgrown, abandoned place, held a suprising number of wild creatures. Probably attracted by the trees and other brush, and the absence of man. She went into her old house just long enough to get her old bow, a bright pink thing made before the War of something called 'fiber-glass'. Aster wasn't quite sure what fiber-glass was. It didn't look much like the glass that was used in windows, or that had once been in front of the habitats in the Mouse House. And real glass didn't bend like the fiber-glass bow, either. But it seemed to be practically indestructible, which was good. She would shoot a rabbit or a squirrel with it every couple of days. She had a couple of places to cook, now. She had made a sort of square in the middle of the Mouse House out of bricks, and sometimes made a fire in it, that she cooked with, or roasted some of the nuts over. It made smoke, and there was no chimney, but if she kept the doors to the Mouse House open, it didn't get too bad. She also used her hammer to chip out a little hollow, in the back wall of the 'Common Vampire Bat' habitat where she slept, and sometimes made a tiny fire in there, behind a little door made of a flattened can with lots of big holes punched in it. Just big enough to warm it up before she slept.

She had to put the little fire in the little cubbyhole out before she slept, though. It was only one of several improvements that she had made to her sleeping place. She had gotten some more blankets, pinned them together, and stuffed them with a bunch of grass to make a sort of thin mattress. It was because she was worried about the dried grass catching on fire while she slept that she had to put the little fire out with a pitcher of water, before she went to sleep. She had also made a wooden cover to the large, gravestone shaped opening of the place, the way she had with the habitats where she stored her nuts, except with the little door in the bottom, rather than the top. Once the door was closed, it kept the heat in, and more importantly, kept animals out. Aster had seen what looked like some sort of dog or wolf tracks, in some mud near the pond, and was worried about being attacked in her sleep. They were actually coyote tracks, from the very same coyote that had sniffed her in her sleep the very first night of her return to the Zoo, but she had no way of knowing that, much less that the coyote was far more scared of her than she was of it.

She used some of the wood to make shelves. A small shelf that she actually had to disassemble, as it wouldn't fit through the tiny door of the 'Common Vampire Bat' habitat and reassemble inside, on which she put a few knives, and some odds and ends she collected, such as different seeds, pine cones, small colorful pebbles, bones, and some especially symmetrical looking nuts. Sometimes when she didn't feel like working (or had finished her work and was tired) she would sit by her little shelf, and spend what sometimes seemed like hours, re-arranging these different objects, as if, by finding the right pattern or balance between them, she could somehow restore balance to her life, or to the entire world. But it never worked, though. Something always seemed to be missing.

Eventually, she knocked the tiny shelf apart and threw the boards out of her little 'Common Vampire Bat' habitat where she slept. It was completely inadequate, and making her frustrated. She got some more boards, and made a new shelf. Or rather, _two _shelves, each about 5 feet long and high, and crossing each other in the center. She put all her existing 'treasures' onto it, and frequently added to the collection, as different items she encountered while looking for food caught her eye.

In her efforts to get the appearance of her collection just the way she wanted it to be, Aster sometimes got some pieces of chalky rock, and drew on the floor and walls of the Mouse House, in geometrical patterns. Always in shapes. Squares, triangles, hexagons, and circles. She wished the could make hexagon shaped shelves, but she lacked the woodworking skills and the tools to do so. At times, she would put some of her objects into the shapes on the floor, and study them, then shook her head, put them back on the shelf, and erased the chalky geometrical drawings with a damp rag, only to start over again, differently, in a day or two.

It got colder, and sometimes Aster would wake up shivering, and have to go stand by the fire she kept banked in the big square of bricks she had made. Most of the things growing in what had once been the Zoo had some sort of use. She could weave together long pieces of straw, or cat-tails to make a sort of mat that she could eat from and pretend it was a plate. She tried to make a basket, but the straw and cattails weren't sturdy enough for it. She had better luck with some thin branches from a weeping willow tree, though the baskets she made were rather ugly and couldn't fit more than a pint or so of nuts. Even the disgusting little hickory weevils (which she would always find when she went to get some nuts out of her cache) had uses. She could bait a fish-hook with them, or put them in a battered pan over the fire, where they would sizzle and melt into mostly fat, that she could use to fry things. It didn't taste too bad, and she got tired of eating boiled meat after a while.

Sometimes she tried to dry some of the tiny apples and grapes in the sun, with mostly poor results. Although it seldom rained in Dystopia, since the War, it seemed like it always drizzled whenever she laid down cut up apples on flat rocks to dry. When she tried drying them in her pan, over the fire, they turned into slices of baked apples, which tasted good, but really couldn't be stored. Always, before, her father had bought dried fruit for the winter from merchants in Dystopia, and Aster wasn't quite sure how they did it. Possibly there were books in the Library that might explain how, but she was too frightened of leaving the Zoo to go there any more. Besides, for all she knew, the Library books had long since been burned on the Maestro's overly-large, inferno-like fireplace. It seemed fairly likely. Likely enough, at any rate, that she could use it as a justification to herself for not going out to read up on the subject of fruit-drying, when she knew deep down that the real reason was that she was afraid.

But there was always plenty to do. As the amount of nuts began to dwindle, Aster invented other ways to distract herself, to keep from having to think too much (though her distractions actually involved thinking - just not about her family or the Maestro). She forced herself to eat the internal organs (well cleaned) of the squirrels, rabbits, and other animals she hunted. She had heard once that the internal organs had a lot of the same vitamins that fruits and vegetables did. Since her attempts at drying the little fruit she could find were mostly a failure, she needed to get her proper vitamins somehow. But it _tasted _awful. It took a long time to force herself to choke it down. Sometimes she would mix a small bite of liver or kidney with a mouthful of nuts, to try and dilute the taste. There were also some plants to eat. Not fruit, but daylily leaves and burdock and sunflower roots. She tried to store most of the roots for the winter, but made a sort of a 'stew' sometimes by boiling the daylily leaves with meat. There were also a few vegetables, in a garden her father had apparently started earlier in the year. It was late in the season for most of them, but she did get some potatoes, onions, and beets by digging around with the shovel.

There were quite a few insects during the warmer days, and Aster got some old, dusty jars, punched small holes in the lids, and would put the insects inside them. She would line them up, on the floor of the Mouse House, and pretend she had her own little insect zoo. She didn't know the names of all the insects, though, so it wasn't that much fun, and would let them go in the grass before the end of the day so they could find their way home.

There were a number of stray cats living around the Zoo, some of which were descendents of the tame cats that Aster and her family had once kept, others feral for generations, and attracted by the vermin, the overgrowth, and the absence of any human beings except for a single one who sometimes made strange cries, other times made a terrible banging or rasping with metal things, but didn't seem to actually bother them. They were also attracted to the few bits of the animals that Aster hunted, but didn't eat (sometimes she couldn't force herself to eat the more disgusting parts of the animals like their intestines, even though she worried she needed the vitamins). Aster noticed them lurking around on occasion, and remembered the pet cats she used to have. She wished that she could find a little kitten, and maybe tame it for her very own. She could name it Tony Tiger. But it was the wrong time of the year for kittens. Sometimes, Aster would put a few bits of meat where she thought some of the cats were hiding, and eventually some of them would come within a few feet of her when she called them, and eat meat if she tossed it to them, but they would never let her touch or stroke them the way the pet cats she used to have as a child would.

Meanwhile, it was getting colder. Aster was getting less sleep, and waking up shivering more often. She decided she would have to get some more boards and wall off a small area of the Mouse House, near the 'Common Vampire Bat' enclosure where she slept, then move her brick firepit in there, so she could keep the smaller area warm at night without risking setting her dried-grass mattress on fire. She measured the floor and walls with a yardstick, to figure out how much wood she would need for two walls, about 10 feet apart. This was all improper construction, of course. Not insulated or anything so proper as that. But it would work.

It was slow going, getting the necessary amount of lumber. It was far more than was needed to simply board off one of the former animal habitats in the Mouse House in order to protect her cached nuts from squirrels. Aster didn't feel like going to get one of the hand wagons, on which she could have carried several boards at once. She liked better to look at the plants (or at least their bare stalks), and the cats, and carry the boards one at a time, alternating between holding onto it with her hands, and placing it on her shoulders. Then sometimes she would stop fetching boards, and do something else instead, like try to call the cats to her, or re-arrange all her pebbles, pine cones, and other 'treasures' on her shelf, never quite satisfied with how she had them lined up. She tried putting some of them in jars that were laid on their sides, and in the spaces between the jars. Maybe she needed a bigger shelf,yet. Or more things to put on it. Like a blue bottle. She had had a blue bottle, once. She remembered that. She had stolen it from Daniel Wolfkiller, though he said he didn't really care. Where was it now? In her house? That's where she had left it, but it could be her father had thrown it away after the Maestro had enslaved her. She didn't really want to go in the house to look. She wasn't sure if she would be more sad if the bottle were still there, or if it was gone.

Eventually, Aster had about half the lumber she was going to need, or enough for one wall, piled in the Mouse House (Which was starting to resemble a combination between an animal's den, a pantry, a supply shed, and a museum). She began sawing the boards to the proper measurements, making a framework of thicker boards to mount, and eventually nail the thinner boards to. She had been at this work for nearly an hour, when she was interrupted by a shadow falling over her.

Aster looked up. There was a man, dressed in ragged clothing and wearing a hooded vest made of several opossum pelts standing there. She didn't much like opossum fur, but at least it wasn't one of the uniforms that the Maestro's guards wore, and she supposed it was probably warmer than her own Zookeeper's uniform. She'd been shivering a lot, lately. Maybe she should get another uniform, and wear two of them, to keep warm.

"I'm sorry." Aster said. "I didn't hear you come in. I was busy working. I need to get this wall done before winter."

She waved her hammer vaguely at the pile of lumber, then set it down. "We haven't had any visitors to the zoo for a long time… I'm afraid the Zoo is actually closed. The animals are gone. I think the Maestro ate them. I haven't been able to catch any more."

The man folded his arms and said nothing. Aster got worried. It wouldn't do for him to have a bad impression of the Zoo. "I did have some interesting insects that I caught. But I let them go again, and they haven't been around for a while. Probably there will be more insects, and perhaps some animals in the spring. If you like, I can write you a voucher for a free admission."

The man finally spoke. "Aster!"

"Yes… that's me. Aster…" Aster frowned. "Or is it Betty?… I guess it's whatever you want it to be. I get confused, sometimes. There's really nobody to talk to here, except some stray cats, and I can't get them to come over by me."

"Aster…" The man looked around in confusion. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm building two walls." Was the man stupid? Wasn't it obvious what she was doing? "It's getting colder, and I need to keep the heat in where I sleep."

"Aster…" The man sounded upset. "You _can't _stay here."

"Why not?" Aster waved at the interior of the Mouse House. "I got plenty of food stored. And once I get the walls done, I'll have a warm area where I sleep."

The man slapped her then. Not hard, but the blow was as shocking as a pitcher full of ice water to the face. "Stupid girl! You're leaving spoor! There's tracks everywhere around here. Not to mention your smoke, and the pit you dug for a toilet."

The 'stupid girl' comment finally let Aster recognize the man. She shook her head, clearing away some of her confusion. "Wolfkiller?"

"You're lucky I'm not the Maestro." He said. "Right now I assume he's interested in things other than you, because if he came here, he'd find you almost immediately. Especially with those wardogs of his. But you can't assume that he's not going to track you down at some point."

"Bloody hell." Aster stood, thinking for a moment, then balled her fist, as if she wanted to return Wolfkiller's slap. "What happened? Your note said you'd come back. And you never did. You left me alone."

"I'm sorry." It was inadequate, but he tried to explain. "When I went back to the stables, all the horses had been killed, and my room had been tossed. I don't know why, or what they suspected me of, or if there was even any reason for it at all, but it was too dangerous for me to stay. I left the city that night, with my family. I had to stay in hiding with them for a month. I eventually did come back here, but wasn't able to get into the palace or get a message to you. That place was locked down tight."

"Not anymore" Aster informed him. Unnecessarily, as it turned out.

Wolfkiller nodded. "I know. The last time I was in the city… things were pretty bad. I could have gotten into the palace then, but didn't give much for my chances of getting out, again. And I thought you were dead. So many were. Then three days ago I heard that the maestro had 'let go of the only b… one he ever kneeled to'. I couldn't picture him kneeling to anyone, and letting them live, mind you. But it seemed odd enough that I thought it might be you."

"Why me?"

"Hope?" The man shrugged. "I've been hoping to find you and talk to you for so long now. And because he kneeled to you. There's nobody _strong _enough to make him do that. Nobody _stronger _than him. That leaves someone _smarter _than him."

"Oh, so now you think I'm smart." Aster wrinkled up her nose. "After you keep calling me 'stupid girl' all the time."

"You're incredibly smart." Daniel Wolfkiller admitted. "The smartest person I know. Also, probably the most foolish, in many ways."

"Because I didn't keep it under my hat." Aster thought about that, and what it had cost her. "You said you wanted to talk to me. About what? Why would you want to talk to me if you think I'm foolish."

"Because I saw you watching the Maestro. For years. I need to know what you saw. If he has any weaknesses. Any way to be killed."

Memories from years ago, Wolfkiller taunting her and telling her that the Maestro didn't have any weaknesses, and that she wasn't smart enough to find any, surfaced at different points in her mind and connected.

"You ugly son of a bitch." Aster swore. "You sicced me on him!"

She began screaming: "You _used _me! Do you have any idea what sort of hell I went through! Do you! Nearly torn apart by that cock of his! Raped by his guards! Made to watch while he burned people to death? While he ate a little boy! Raped my sister to death! For years! Came back and my own father was dead! God Damn you to hell! Couldn't you have done something! At least told my father I was still alive? Done _something _besides use me?"

"Yes, I _used _you." Wolfkiller hissed. "But I didn't put you in that situation. I tried to keep you out of it, and if there had been a way to get you out of there, believe me I would have done so. But since you were there, NOT using you wasn't going to make your situation any better. You wouldn't have been hurt any less, raped any fewer times. I couldn't help you. But I could use you, to help others."

"You think you have it bad?" He pointed at her. "Think about the woman you killed, Betty something or the other. Slit her throat. Not that I blame you, there wasn't anything you could have done. But she's dead, and you're alive. Think about that."

He lowered his accusing finger. "He did the same thing to my wife, you know. She wasn't lucky enough to have someone slit her throat for her. The - thing - he put inside her ripped her apart from the inside out."

Wolfkiller began pacing, his eyes half closed. "He gave me a 'choice', you know. Said I was 'lucky'. I got to 'choose' whether to hand over my wife or my daughter to him. And to work for him, in exchange for his not taking both. Then, after my wife died, he kept asking about my daughter. Never came for her. But kept asking about her. Then let me know that he knew that she had had children of her own."

"As for your father… he asked me not to tell him if you were alive or dead. If I'd been here and known that the Maestro had told him he had killed you, though, before he took your sister, I would have told him it was a lie. But I wasn't here, and I didn't know."

"So, you tell me, Zookeeper's daughter. If it had been the other way around, if you thought you could use me somehow, to find a way to kill him and save your father and sister, to save all the people he's going to rape and kill in the future, would you have hesitated? Or would you do the 'noble' thing? The stupid and useless thing?"

"No. Damn you." She was no hero.

"I didn't think so." Survival was often an ugly thing, and as odd as she was, Aster was a survivor. The fact that she'd gotten out of the Maestro's palace alive was proof of that. "So tell me. Did you learn anything, watching him all those years. Does he have any weaknesses… some way to kill him?"

Aster thought about all the bits of information, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, that she had learned in her four years at the palace.

"He has some weaknesses. Most of them will just hurt him a little and piss him off." She sorted out mentally, everything she had learned, into categories. "There's some things that might kill him, in theory, but it would be like belling the cat, in practice. He'd kill you long before what you were doing could kill him."

"Then.. There's no hope." Aster had never seen Wolfkiller look dejected before.

"I'm not sure…" There was one last category in Aster's mental list that she hadn't mentioned. "There's nothing you or I, or any normal person can do to kill the Maestro. But there's somebody, maybe, who could."

"Somebody?" That definitely got Wolfkiller's attention. "Who! Tell me!"

Aster shook her head. She wasn't sure if she should tell, or not. There was something she had to know about Daniel Wolfkiller first.

"You tell me something, first." she said. "Why did you shoot the tiger, back at the Maestro's palace. Was it because you hated it? Was it to get even because you were scared of it, and one of them scratched you?"

The scarred man didn't see what the tiger had to do with the subject at hand, but decided to humor Aster. If she _knew _of a way to kill the Maestro, the last thing he needed was her clamming up because he pissed her off. Of course, giving the wrong answer to her question _probably_ would piss her off, but giving no answer at all _definitely _would piss her off.

"I didn't hate the tiger." He told her. "I was very frightened of, it yes, and didn't much like it when it clawed up my arm. It made me angry. But hate it? No. It's pointless to hate or try to get even with an animal that doesn't know any better and can't help itself. And as it was, it was locked up in a cage and hardly a threat to anyone."

"Then why shoot it?"

"Same reason you killed that woman, I imagine." Wolfkiller said. "It was suffering and dying, and there was nothing I could do to help. It was the kindest thing to do, to put it out of it's misery."

"I see." Aster went over and looked at her shelf of various objects. She began moving them around them as she thought.

Wolfkiller said nothing, and after a few minutes went over to the shelf, looking at the geometrical patterns, and noticed for the first time, the chalk shapes drawn all over the floor of the Mouse House. He turned his head back and forth, trying to make sense of it. It was hard. The compulsive caching of food and the crude place where Aster slept clashed with this… elegant… arrangement of objects. It was hard to decide if this were the den of an animal… or of an angel. Or something that partook of the natures of both.

Now Aster was putting some of the objects, some shiny brown seeds, into some of the shapes on the floor. The former stable master shook his head. The arrangement almost _seemed _to make sense, to have _meaning _but he had enough wisdom to know that he was never, ever going to understand what that meaning was. Possibly, if he had had a mind like Aster's, who saw reality from some point slightly off what constituted 'center' for most people, and probably had more thoughts and smarter thoughts in an hour than a dozen ordinary people had in a month, he might be able to grasp it. As it was, he had about as much hope of understanding it as an opossum had of learning to read.

_Or of a blind man learning to read. _Wolfkiller thought wryly. _I've managed to elude the Maestro for over a year now, so let's not be too down your own intelligence, Daniel._

"Are you going to tell me who it is you think can kill the Maestro?" He asked again.

"I will." said Aster. The words had the tone of a promise. "I just wish I could get this right."

She moved some more objects around on the shelf. "It needs something else. I wish I had that blue glass bottle. Do you remember it?"

"I remember it well." It was the one she had stolen from him, her crude theft leaving all sorts of obvious clues.

"It used to be in my house. I kept it on my window, where the sun could shine through it. But I don't want to go in there. I don't live in that house any more. And I buried my father in front of it. So it's like a marker." She frowned at the objects and moved an acorn up by one shelf. "Do you think maybe you could look, and see if it's there? I'm not sure if it will be, my father might have thrown it away."

"I'll go look." He owed her that much. The bottle might have originally been stolen, but since that time, Aster had far more than _earned _it. Nobody should have had to suffer and see the things that she had. Nobody deserved that.

Daniel Wolfkiller left the Mouse House and was back in several minutes with the bottle. Aster was sitting on the floor, drawing a hexagon with an ornate arrangement of triangles on each side, diminishing in size. It reminded him of a snowflake. He set the bottle down next to her, wordlessly. Aster continued drawing for a few more minutes, then took the bottle, stood up, and turned it over in her hands, inspecting it.

"So it was there." She said, sounding a little surprised. "It's exactly the same one. Where did you find it?"

"It was on your window, in your old room. Where you said you kept it."

"So… he kept it there." Her father had kept her things. Maybe he had hoped she would someday come home. And she had. But it had been just a few, heartbreaking days too later. She sniffed. "Kept my bottle, and things, for me. That's good, I guess."

She took the cobalt blue bottle, and put it in the center of the very top shelf, where the two crossing shelves intersected. Then she regarded her other objects, and next to it, in a sort of an off-center triangular arrangement, no object really pointed directly towards the front or the back, put a white, fanged cat skull with a high, domed brain pan, and a pointed, jet black quartz crystal. Aster took a few steps back to regard it.

"That's better… I think." She looked some more. "As good as I can get it, I guess. I wish I could put it in the sun, but then the weather would wreck it."

"It's very nice." Wolfkiller said, although he didn't understand it at all. Then curiosity made him add: "What does it mean?"

"I don't know… the world, maybe." It was a new answer for Aster, one she had not thought of before. "If I could get it right, maybe I could understand the world. But it might have to be as big as the whole world, for that to happen."

"Well, it can't be that big. It's only one small shelf." He pointed out.

"Not here. But in my head, maybe." Aster said, and Wolfkiller wondered about what was going on in that head, that she thought she could fit the whole world into it. Or maybe she _could_ fit the whole world into it. How was he to know for sure? The Post-War world that he lived in was a world of dark miracles, and strange things could and did happen. Like a man being transformed into a ten foot tall green monster.

"We should close the doors, and lock them." Aster said. "To keep the weather and animals out. It'll protect my things for a while, after I'm gone."

She looked at all the objects, occupying all the dimensions, vertical and horizontal space. If only she could make it perfect. If only she could make the world perfect, instead of the Hell that it was. But maybe close to perfect was as good as even she could do. She turned back to Wolfkiller. "You're right. I can't stay here. It's too close to the Maestro. And I've been leaving tracks and making a mess everywhere. I guess I wasn't thinking. So I'll go with you. If the Maestro hasn't found you in a year, you must know somewhere safe. And I'll tell you about him on the way."

_Him. _"The man who you think can kill the Maestro."

"Not a man." Aster corrected Wolfkiller, and for a moment he thought she meant a woman, perhaps the Shulk, but then why had she used the male pronoun _him. _Besides which, the Shulk was securely locked up and there was no way to free her. Aster's next statement, however, shocked him far more than if it had been the Shulk she was thinking of.

"Not a man." Aster repeated. "A _Vampire_."


	20. Chapter 20

Chapter 20. Vampire Junction

Aster took very little from the Zoo when she went with Daniel Wolfkiller. Her bow and arrows. Some spare Zookeeper's uniforms. Her best knife. She had wanted to take the surgical tools from the medical building, and some axes, saws, and other tools from the sheds around the zoo, but the older man refused. There were plenty of such things lying around from Pre-War times, he said, and although the horse he had brought to the zoo was large (part Percheron, he said), he didn't want to burden it with much more weight than the two of them. Nor did he want to waste time either getting a lot of stuff, or having her tell him immediately about the _Vampire, _which he wasn't entirely certain actually existed. While it was true that he lived in an age of dark miracles, and all manner of improbable (and usually unpleasant) things did exist, it was also true that Aster was half-mad with grief and abuse. The _Vampire _could simply be a figment of her imagination.

He did relent and go back into Aster's house again to get a small, glass framed photograph of Aster with her father and Thumb, taken when Aster had been much younger. Thumb was practically little more than a baby in it. Aster only glanced at the photograph to make sure it was the one she wanted, then stuck it in the bottom of one of the horse's saddlepacks. She didn't want to look into the eyes of her father and sister. Not yet. Not so soon.

Wolfkiller took some clothes out of another saddlepack. A rough, homespun dress and a coat made from a cut-up pre-war blanket crudely stitched together.

"Put these on." He told Aster. She gave him a curious look and he explained. "Sorry, but that Zookeeper's uniform sticks out like a sore thumb, just now. Half the people in Dystopia know about the 'only one the Maestro ever kneeled to'. Frankly, I'm surprised he hasn't hunted you down for that. Just to stop the talk. I suppose he has other things on his mind."

"He has a _lot_ on his mind." Aster said in a dark tone.

The older man gave her a curious look, but didn't ask her exactly what it was the Maestro had on his mind. He turned his back so that she could undress. "Well, regardless, you're famous, you know. Half the people in Dystopia know about you, if not where you are. They think the Zoo is cursed, which is lucky for you. Keeps them from poking around here. If they did know about you, most of them would probably sell you back to the Maestro for a pound of meat."

"They'd probably get the kuru." Aster muttered, her tone darker. Daniel Wolfkiller, not having her education, didn't know what 'kuru' was, and assumed it was some sort of slang term (or in Aster's particular case, possibly some sort of _medical _term) he was personally unfamiliar with for vomiting or other problems caused by eating either rotten or undercooked meat. Not surprising. Food, especially meat, was becoming very scarce, and it wasn't surprising that desperation would lead starving people to eat meat that was tainted.

After Aster had stripped out of her Zookeeper's uniform and put on the shabbier clothes, the older man helped Aster get onto the horse. She had ridden a horse, before, of course, but never one as large as the part-Percheron mongrel, and could barely get her toe into the stirrup.

"Should have rigged this for you." He muttered, lifting her upwards with no difficulty onto the rear seat of the double saddle. He himself had no problems getting on the horse, being 8 inches taller than Aster's own 5 foot 9 inch height. Besides, he was used to the height of the animal. He got onto the horse, in front of Aster. He needed to be able to see and control the animal.

"We'll both ride until we get about a mile from the city." The former stable master told Aster over his shoulder. "We need to get some distance between ourselves and _him._ After that, we'll have to take turns walking and riding. There's a long way to go, and I don't want the horse getting exhausted."

"A long way to go…" Aster thought about that. "Where are we going, anyway?"

"Somewhere safe."

"Nowhere is safe." Aster said, and snorted slightly. Though of course she knew that wasn't quite true, but the few safe places that did exist were next to impossible to get to. "If we stay in the city, he'll find us. If you go to the Outside, he'll find us. If you go to the _Beyond…" _She enunciated the term for the poisonous, radioactive lands that were past even the parched farmland surrounding Dystopia where unfortunate farmers were forced to scratch a living for the few years they could manage it, "He probably won't find us, but he won't have to. We'll die of radiation in days, or weeks."

"We're going close to the _Beyond_." Wolfkiller said. "Perhaps it's even in the _Beyond. _But nobody comes there, and there's no radiation. Or at least, not very much."

"Everywhere in the _Beyond _has radiation." Everyone knew that. Scavengers who were driven by desperation to get Pre-War jewelry, or even just plain metals, had a remarkably short lifespan.

"Not here." The man shook his head. Seeing that Aster still didn't believe him, he offered her proof. "When we first found the place, it was infested with rats. And there's fish. Small ones, not very good for eating. But neither the rats, nor the fish, nor the bugs were mutated or sick."

"Hmmm." Aster thought about it. If a rat could live somewhere, probably a man could live. She hoped. They were both mammals, after all. "How can that be? What is this place, some sort of undergound bunker, like Rick Jones had."

"Nothing so obvious." In Wolfkiller's opinion, Jones had been a great fool, who had brought his own fate on himself. "It's an abandoned mine. An iron mine, I think."

"In the Catskill Mountains?" That would explain a great deal. The Outside, which the Maestro's various technological devices had at least somewhat cleared of radiation, extended for tens of miles, and the Catskill Mountains were near the edge of that area. The green monster needed that much farmland, given the poor production of the land, to keep himself and Dystopia supplied with food. Though his foolish policies during the past century were making that nearly impossible, despite the lesser radiation.

Aster didn't understand why the Maestro didn't improve his devices, and get rid of more of the radiation in the Outside. Or clear a larger area of radiation. Or something. That way there would be more food, and he wouldn't have to now be resorting to cannibalism.

But then…

_What makes you think he's __**resorting **__to it? _Came a mocking voice in her head. _What makes you think he has any objection to it at all? Has he ever displayed __**any**__ morality or regret over the thing's he's done? Very likely, he __**likes**__ what he's doing. As for getting rid of more radiation… what should he do that for? He was created by radiation. It makes him __**stronger**__. Why should he get rid of more of it? For our sakes? Don't make me laugh, girl._

Why indeed, should the Maestro do things for the sake of other people, and not himself? Aster tried to think of a reason. She did things, or had once, for her sister and father, but she loved them. The Maestro didn't love anybody except himself.

_He needs us._ She pointed out to the mocking voice in her head. After all, it was ordinary, weak human beings who grew his food and made most of his devices for him.

The mocking voice just laughed. _Oh, yes. He does. But do you honestly think that HE knows that? Or would even admit it to himself if he DID know it?_

No, it was true enough. The Maestro would never admit to needing anybody. That would be showing vulnerability, and it was quite clear to Aster that he would never do that, for any reason. He had let his own son die, rather than show any vulnerability by doing the one thing that might have saved him, changing back into his human form so he could give the premature infant a blood transfusion.

The two horse mounted travellers went a few miles from the Zoo, then Daniel Wolfkiller stopped the horse in an old, Pre-War railroad yard that existed near the outer fringes of Dystopia. There were several engines and cars, some still on the tracks, some fallen over for various reasons. Most had been partially stripped of metal. He got off the horse, then helped Aster off and led it by the reins past several box cars that were fallen at various angles, as if bringing them into the interior of a maze, then stopped them at a point where they could not possibly be seen from outside the train yard.

"We'll stop here for the night." He said to Aster, as he used a rope to tie the horse to a sturdy looking piece of metal that jutted from one of the boxcars "I need to feed and water the horse."

Aster had noticed grain in the saddlebags, but wasn't clear on where the water would come from. The few canteens she had seen in the saddlebags were barely enough for her and the older man for the trip to the Catskill Mountains. As if in answer to her question, Wolfkiller went into a nearby boxcar, and came out carrying four large, pre-War plastic bottles. The bottles contained 5 gallons each, and were in two pairs, each tied together with a thick leather strap. It was by this strap that the older man held the bottles, one pair for each of his hands. Aster was impressed. She had carried such bottles before, but always only one at a time. Those things were _heavy_ when they were full, and here was Wolfkiller, slinging them around four of them as if they weighed no more than the canteens in the saddlbags.

Of course, the Maestro could have easily lifted those bottles, or an entire Pre-War tanker truck full of water for that matter, but he was a Gamma. Some sort of freak. It was actually far more impressive when a normal man did it. Not noticing, or perhaps not caring that Aster was impressed by the fact that he could lift 160 pounds, Wolfkiller set the bottles down, went back into the boxcar, and brought out a two barrels that had been sawn in half, one large and one small. He set them down near the horse, poured some grain from the saddlebag into one barrel, then poured half the water from one of the bottles into the other barrel, and let the horse have at it.

Aster watched this curiously. "Why didn't you let the horse have all the water?" It seemed strange for him to go to the trouble of carrying so many heavy bottles out, if he wasn't going to even use them all.

"Let me tell you about the three easiest ways to kill a horse." Wolfkiller said as he dug some grubby looking jars of food out of the saddlebags. "First way is to give it all the water it wants to drink. Second way is to give it all the grain that it wants to eat. The third way is to let it run itself to death. Which it will, if you're fool enough to tell it to."

The horse had slurped up most of the water, and was trying to lick the dregs off the bottom of the barrel.

"I'll give it more, later." He said to Aster. He set two jars and a leather package on the ground. "Baked beans, baked possum, and dried apples. We'll have to eat them cold. It's getting dark, and a fire will show. And heating the food will increase the scent."

Wolfkiller twisted the jars open and handed one lid to Aster. Apparently she was supposed to use it as a plate, as there was nothing else. There was no silverware, either. Not even a stick. Aster shrugged and poured some beans out of the jar onto the lid, then dumped some of the possum meat on top of it. She used one finger to scoop it into her mouth. The cold beans tasted awful, and the cold possum tasted worse, almost as if she were eating something that had been sprayed on by a skunk.

The baked apples actually tasted pretty good, almost like a desert, and Aster wished she could have had only that, but it wouldn't have been fair to Daniel Wolfkiller for her to have all the apples while he got stuck with the bad tasting food. Besides which, she knew she needed the protein and fats in the beans and meat, no matter how badly it tasted.

_It could be worse. _She thought. She could still be in the Maestro's palace, and unknowingly, or worse yet, _knowingly,_ eating human flesh. She liked to think she would die before doing such a thing, but who really knew. People did all manner of horrible things when they were desperate or frightened enough and until you were in that situation, you didn't really know for sure _what _you would do.

On the other hand, it could also have been a hell of a lot better. Aster thought with regret about some of the best meals she had had with her father and sister, around Christmas, with a big piece of roast buffalo that had had to be culled, and carrots, and onions, and pickles, and apple cider and raisin pie with sugar sprinkled on top.

She sighed and took another bit of cold, stinky baked possum. It was most definitely not roast buffalo with onions. Far from it. She took a few slices of dried apple, chewed them slowly to get the worst of the taste out of her mouth, then washed it down with some water. She handed the lid back, so it could be put onto the jar again.

Wolfkiller apparently was either more used to the taste of the possum, or, being larger than Aster, had more of an appetite. He ate about twice what she did, belched, then without apologizing, leaned back against the side of a boxcar and regarded Aster curiously.

"So…" He said. "You mentioned someone you said could kill the Maestro. A _Vampire. _Tell me about him."

"I said he could _possibly_ kill the Maestro." Aster corrected the older man.

He waved away her grammatical objections. "Nothing in life is certain. _Possibly _I could get a hangnail tomorrow and die from infection. _Possibly _I could live for another fifty years and die in bed. Tell me about him anyways."

There was so much to tell, Aster wasn't sure where to start. "What do you want to know?"

"Start with exactly how you know about this _Vampire." _Knowing her sources would do a great deal towards determining if the _Vampire _really existed, or was simply a figment of a deranged imagination. "Then explain exactly why you think it is, what abilities he has, that you think might let him kill the Maestro."

"Well… it's a long story." Aster said. She let her memory go back, and began explaining how she had first learned that Michael Morbius was still alive. She started by telling how she had seen his clothes… but not his body… when she and her family had been forced to parade through the Hall of Fallen Heroes, after the Maestro had killed the Hulk. How she had found the book 'Fundamentals of Biochemistry' in Doctor Llewellyn's library, and the name of the author 'Michael Morbius' had seemed familiar to her. How she had learned from Betty 31 that she and her family and friends had fled to Dystopia from Milwaukee, despite the latter being a paradise full of plants and animals, out of fear of a _Vampire. _A Vampire called _Michael Morbius. _

The same man, the same tragic man, who had written 'Fundamentals of Biochemistry' once upon a time, but had been forced by his own need for human blood to kill.

Wolfkiller interrupted her there. "Aster… I believe that this _Vampire_ exists. But I don't see how he could kill the Maestro. I see that he's killed plenty of people, and why Betty 31's people would be afraid of him, but killing regular people is easy. From what you say, the guy's strong, stronger than any ordinary person, but pretty much a wimp compared to the Maestro. Finding him or bringing him here won't help things. In fact, it'll make things worse, because we'll have two monsters killing us instead of one."

Aster looked around at the remains of the rusting trains, that had once served a vital, industrial nation. Before the war. A passage from the book she loved so much came back to her. It had had a man, Eddie she thought his name had been, alone, like her, with a train engine that no longer ran. He had offered a prayer, maybe to the god of trains. _In the name of the best within us...__I must now start this train__!_

Aster offered her own prayer, to whatever god existed for slaves and murderers like herself. _In the name of what is best in us, and in the world, I must now convince Wolfkiller of what needs to be done._

She remembered in the books, that the gods had not listened to Eddie. He had never been able to start the train. Hopefully she would have better luck.

"Monster… the term's relative." Aster said to Wolfkiller. "I killed a woman. Betty 31. Am I a monster?"

"By some standards… yes. But you didn't really have a choice. You did what you had to, to survive."

"_Morbius _doesn't really have a choice, either. He's…" Aster tried to think of the words that would convince Wolfkiller, so that she would succeed where the man in the book had failed, in what needed to be done. "He's like us. When we're given a 'choice' of what to do by the Maestro. When I got to 'choose' what to do about Betty 31. When you got to 'choose' whether to give him your wife or daughter."

"That's the really awful thing about the Maestro. Not what he does to us, but what he makes us do. And the horrible part is, there's always a choice. And he takes our love and our nobility, and our weakness and our fear, and sets things up so that we have just enough weakness and fear to make the wrong choice, and just enough love and nobility to hate ourselves for it."

"I thought the Maestro was the devil once, you know. And maybe I was right. That's what the devil does. Gives people a 'choice', lets them have their free will, but sets things up so any choice is bad. And this _Vampire, _this man, Michael Morbius, in some ways is worse off than we are. He has his own built in Maestro, that he can never get away from. It gives him the same sort of horrible 'choice': He needs to drink human blood, or he'll die. From what I read about him, he spent decades trying to cure himself. He doesn't want to kill. He doesn't _enjoy _it like the Maestro. And he damn sure doesn't go around raping women to death, or burning people alive, or putting them on a spit and eating them!"

Very little surprised Daniel Wolfkiller, but the last thing Aster said did. He started slightly. "The Maestro's a… cannibal? I'd heard stories… but there's always rumors in Dystopia."

"I know a human body when I see one." Aster said. "Even when it's been cut into pieces."

He sighed. "It doesn't really matter. From what you say, they're both cannibals. If I'm dead, it doesn't really make any difference to me what part of me is eaten or drunk, or what reasons my killer had for doing it, or whether he enjoyed it or is sorry."

"Actually, it makes a great deal of difference. Potentially, I might be able to get Michael Morbius to stop killing."

"How?" Wolfkiller snorted. "Convince him to starve himself to death? Commit suicide? Lots of luck with that, if he were inclined to that, he'd have offed himself a long time ago. Sorry, he's a monster. Same sort as you and me. He wants to survive."

"He wants to survive. He needs blood. He _doesn't _want to kill people. In fact, not everyone he attacks dies from it. Some of them survive. Which he and everyone else ought to have been paying attention to, but they kept making the same basic mistake, back before the war. Kept thinking that he should _stop_ drinking blood. Well, if I had my hands on him, I wouldn't make that mistake. I'd try the one thing they never did."

"Praying?" The word was a sneer.

"No, although it wouldn't hurt. But no. I'd offer him a choice. I'd _feed_ the poor bastard."

"Feed him… Aster, your brain's addled. You can't be serious!"

"I assure you, I'm completely serious."

"You'd be dead in less than a week! Probably less than three days. You don't have that much blood. Nobody does."

"Correction. No _**one**_person does." She waited until she saw comprehension in Wolfkiller's eyes. "But it is possible."

"Possible, maybe." Wolfkiller shook his head. "But nobody's going to go along with that. Being sucked on by some sort of human leech. Well, maybe you would, but you're too damn logical for your own good. Most people aren't like you. They think with their feelings, and they aren't going to tolerate being cattle. Being fed on."

"Yes, that's a terrible concept. Obviously completely intolerable." Aster's sarcasm was obvious. "Next time your daughter has a baby, make sure she doesn't nurse it. In fact, tell her you'd rather have your next granddaughter raped to death by the Maestro, and your next grandson roasted on a spit, rather than give a pint or two of blood. It can't be because you're a selfish coward. I mean, you're willing to hand over your own wife to get ripped apart by the Maestro's gamma spawn, you're willing to use a fourteen year old girl who's being repeated raped as a spy without even asking her. But give a little blood? Well, obviously _that_ would be going quite too far."

The older man's face darkened at the mention of the terrible choice he had been forced to make regarding his wife. He clenched his fist, raised it slightly, then forced it down again with an obvious effort of will. "God damn you to hell."

"Then I'm right. You would feed a _Vampire_, with your own blood, to destroy the Maestro."

"I'd let him rip my throat out, to do that. Hell, half the people in Dystopia would." He got up, fished a small metal flask out of one of the saddlebags, sat back down with it, and took a drink. "Bloody hell. You're right. You're a ruthless little bitch, and a shameless manipulator, but you're right. I was wrong. Plenty of people would go along with it. If you put it that way. If they thought it would kill the Maestro… _if. _You still haven't explained why or how you think he can do that. It's not as if he's strong enough to take him on in a fight."

"Well, that's the really interesting part." Aster said. "The thing is, although it's the most obvious and tragic thing about him, Morbius's need to drink blood is actually probably the least interesting thing about him. It's understandable why the pre-War people did it, but calling him a _Vampire, _because he needs to drink blood, was really pretty simple-minded of them. It would be as if you were to call a human being a 'omnivore' because we eat both meat and plants. There's plenty of omnivores, and what people happen to eat is a very minor part of what we do, and what we are capable of."

Aster then spent the next hour or so trying to explain to Daniel Wolfkiller what she had seen, what she had _understood,_ from the files she had read about Morbius, and from what Betty 31 had told her about conditions in Milwaukee. About the _Vampire's _ brilliant, and terrible potential. The older man interrupted her frequently with questions, often having to get her to spend five minutes to explain the meaning of some obscure medical term or the other. Finally, he sat, thinking, occasionally taking a small sip of whatever liquor was in his flask.

Possibly Morbius could take on the Maestro and win. The _Vampire, _for whatever reason, had just the right combination of abilities to do that. Almost as if he had been deliberately designed as a failsafe for something like the Maestro. But it would be terribly hard. It would cost so much. Aster seemed to know that, but the former stable master wondered if she knew just how hard it would be. How much it would cost, and what sort of price. He wasn't sure if she did. Likely, she didn't. Aster understood objects and animals. Brilliantly. She understood people very poorly, and the psychology of human maleness not at all. Possibly he should tell her exactly what it was likely to cost… but no. Telling her wouldn't change anything, and he wanted this thing done. It was using the girl, but he had children and grandchildren. Besides, there was nothing the _Vampire_ could do to Aster that could possibly be worse than what she had already suffered.

No. He would not tell her. Again, he'd use her. Poor, damned girl.

"So you're right." Wolfkiller said, screwing the cap back on the flask. "He could… possibly… destroy the Maestro. But it's a slim chance. Terribly hard. And there would be such a high price to pay. For him. And not just for him. I don't know if he, or anyone, would be willing to pay it. We're all monsters. All of us. Him. You. Me. Everyone left in the world. Monsters. Not heroes."

"It has to be done, though. If someone doesn't kill the Maestro, he's going to destroy the world." Aster thought about all the animals in the Zoo that had died. And all the animals that Betty 31 had said existed in Wisconsin, that would probably go straight into the Maestro's stomach if he ever found out about them.

"It _should_ be done." Wolfkiller corrected. "That doesn't mean it _has _to be. Or that it _can_ be, or _will_ be. A lot of things that should be done, aren't, and a lot of things that shouldn't be done, get done anyways. Look at the world. The ancients quite obviously _shouldn't_ have blown it up with nuclear weapons. But they did anyways."

Aster thought about this. She had thought she knew a way to help the _Vampire _to be better. To give him a real choice, a good choice, rather than all bad ones, like the Maestro did. But maybe that was just stupid kid wishful thinking. "Wolfkiller, do you think people ever learn to be any better? Do you think anyone ever does? Or is everyone just stupid, and a monster forever, and we all go on making the same dumb mistakes and doing the same dumb things, over and over, in our lives, and in history."

The question made him look like he wanted to open the flask again. "You hated me when you were ten. Or was it twelve? No matter. Do you still hate me?"

Aster thought about this. "I don't really _like _you. You… confuse and disappoint me. That's the best way to put it. But hate you…?" She sighed. "Hate's a very personal emotion, at least with me. Like love. Or what my father said about respect. It actually has to be earned. I _hate _the Maestro. And several of his guards, because of what they did to me. I can't just 'hate' people who never really did anything that bad to me, because of some personal disgust that's really probably no more important than my disgust for certain types of food. Doing that sort of reduces the value of hate, just like loving people I never met, because a preacher says I should, reduces the value of love."

"Well, there's your answer. You change at least. It takes you a long time, and going through hell to get there, but you do change."

"You said other people don't think like me." Aster pointed out.

"They don't. But they don't need to. They have you."

"I don't think I want to do other people's thinking for them." Aster said. "It's hard work, and they don't listen to me most of the time anyways. And it just slows me down for doing the sort of thinking I want to do for myself."

"Listen.." Wolfkiller said. "You want to find this _Vampire_ and feed him, right?"

"I think we have to."

"Then you're going to need people. You're going to need to convince them. And it won't be easy. Oh, they'll probably do it. To keep their sons and daughters away from the Maestro, they'll do it. But you'll have to convince them. I'll help you. Lord knows you're terrible dealing with people. I'll help you with that. But you're the one with the knowledge."

"Besides," he went on. "This place Betty came from, Milwaukee, sounds a hell of a lot better than here. It gives us somewhere to go to. The people I'm staying with have been wanting to leave here for a long time. We had a place to go… but I think Milwaukee is a better idea. For several reasons. And if things don't work out with the _Vampire_ the way you want them to… well we can always kill him. Probably the Maestro will eventually find us and kill us with him gone, but maybe not for years, or even decades. A few years, living like decent people, instead of in this hell, is worth having. People will give almost anything, for a few more years for themselves, and their family, when they're looking death in the face."

Aster had gotten alert halfway through what Wolfkiller said. Alarm bells went off in her head. "Kill the _Vampire? _You can't do that!"

"I can, and I will, if you can't get him to stop killing people."

"No! You can't!" Aster insisted. "Don't you understand? He's the reason why Milwaukee is the way it is. He's why everything there is alive. But he's not finished with what he did. We need him to finish."

"That's…" He shook his head. "That's impossible. I can see how he could kill the Maestro. Maybe. From what you said. But how can he make miles of plants and animals grow. Even the Maestro can't do that. Not even if he had ten times the radiation shields he had. No-one can do that."

"I thought so, too. I thought Betty was raving when she told me about the plants and animals in Wisconsin. But it is possible. When I read Morbius's files, I saw how he could do it. And of course, he would do it. Despite being a monster. Or maybe _because _he's a monster. He needs human blood to live. That means he has to keep humans alive."

Wolfkiller scratched his head. He thought he might be getting lice again. "I don't get it. How can he do this? From what you said, he's raving mad. He's hardly going to be running radiation shields, and even if he were, where would he get the power to run them? The shielding the Maestro has up takes a large chunk of the hydro plant over by Niagara Falls. Now, I know that some idiot politicians right before the War acted like there was an electricity fairy, but there isn't."

"Don't think physics." Aster gave him a slight grin. "Think biology."

Wolfkiller raised his arms helplessly. "Does he plug radiation shielding into trees?"

Aster's grin widened. "Nothing so complex." She then proceeded to tell him some of the things Morbius had done during his life. Finding cures, or making cures. And to some things, the vampire himself _was_ a cure.

"That's sounds more complex than an electricity tree." The older man finally groused, folding his arms. What Aster had told him was possible. Maybe. And if it were true, it did need to be finished.

"There's nothing in it that he can't do, though. That he hasn't done before."

"He sounds dangerous. More dangerous than the Maestro, if you ask me."

"Everything useful is dangerous." Aster said. "By definition. It's up to us to decide how to use it."

"Sounds more to me like it's up to Morbius. I definitely don't like the sound of what you told me about him. Not one bit."

"Do you like the sound of the Maestro any better?"

"No." Wolkiller got up and put his flask back in the saddlebags, so he wouldn't be tempted to have any more. He got out a few rough blankets, and tossed two of them to Aster. It was dangerous. And horrible. But maybe that's all monsters like him deserved. And it was a chance. "At least the _Vampire _will kill us quickly. Or do whatever it is he decides to do with us quickly, and we won't really care after that. So it won't really matter. I'd rather have that for my family, than what's waiting for us here."

"Go to sleep." He told Aster. "In the morning, we need to go back into Dystopia."

"I thought we were going to the Catskill Mountains." Aster didn't like the thought of going back _towards _the Maestro, rather than _away _from him, as fast and as far as possible."

"We are. But first we need to find some people."

"Some people you know?" Aster could understand his wanting to get friends or relatives away from a mad Maestro turned cannibal.

He shook his head. "Some people you told me about. Betty 31's family and friends."

Aster frowned. She had mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, maybe she could make up for what she had done to poor Betty 31, by warning her family and friends how insanely dangerous the Maestro had now become, and getting them somewhere relatively safe. On the other hand, she didn't really _know _them, and it was dangerous to go back into the city. She was no hero. She was afraid. But she would do it anyways.

But why was Wolfkiller doing it? He wasn't the one who had killed Betty 31. He didn't have any guilt to assuage.

"Why are you going to get them?" Aster said.

"Two reasons." The man raised one finger. "First of all, like I said, the people I'm with have a place they're planning to flee to. I think Milwaukee is a better place to go to, for several reasons. But they've been making their plans for months, and will need a lot of convincing to change their minds. More than just the two of us. Getting Betty 31's family to talk to them will help change their minds."

Aster nodded. It made sense. "What's the second reason?"

Wolfkiller raised a second finger. "War… or rather, avoiding one. From what you tell me, there's a lot of people already in Milwaukee. People defend their territory, or most of them do. If we go to Milwaukee, they aren't going to be happy about us just showing up and moving in. They'd probably try to kill us. Or make slaves out of us. And there's more of them, than of us. If we bring some of their own back, their own people, that we've saved from a monster worse than their _Vampire,_ then they've got a reason to be grateful. It's a way to buy our way in."

"So you're using them." Aster said. It was a statement, not an accusation. It was the way things were. Wolfkiller had used her in the past, but she had also used him.

"I'm using them." He agreed. "I'm also helping them."

She said nothing. It was much what she had planned for the _Vampire. _And, if all went well, what he would be doing to, and for, everyone else. Maybe a fair trade was all that monsters could hope for. They lacked the nobility for pure generosity.

"Fair enough." Aster finally said. She rolled herself up in the blankets, tucked one corner under her head, and went to sleep.


	21. Chapter 21

Chapter 21. Family

Aster and Daniel Wolfkiller took turns riding the horse around the outskirts of Dystopia. Usually, Wolfkiller walked, as his longer legs kept up with the horse more easily than Aster was able to. The buildings and houses there were not nearly as nice as those near the Maestro's palace. Some were pre-war ruins that had been repaired as best as the owners could, others were made from scavenged materials or spindly logs, and often looked like they were falling apart. There were a lot of uninhabited pre-war ruins, which were usually covered with graffiti. Some of the graffiti was obviously faded spraypaint, made before the War, but some was more recent, and made with ink, soot, or chalk.

A large percentage of the recent graffiti actually seemed to be referring to Aster herself, as it had a crude picture of a woman (rather obscenely over-endowed in the breast department), with the caption: "The only bitch the Maestro ever knelt to." Aster really wasn't happy with the idea that she had acquired some sort of fame or notoriety among the population of Dystopia. She never really had wanted to impress people with anything other than being a Zookeeper, and unwanted fame was likely to make the Maestro try to hunt her down at some point.

Below the picture and captions on a few of the assorted graffiti drawings was something Aster thought at first was a chemical formula: A2Z. Except that there were no chemicals in the periodic table that were abbreviated either with an 'A' or a 'Z'. At first, Aster still thought that perhaps it was meant to be a chemical formula, written by members of an increasingly uneducated population who were not all that familiar with the periodic table. Though what a chemical formula had to do with her she wasn't entirely sure. However, she abandoned the idea that some chemical or the other was for some unfathomable reason associated with her, when she saw that some of the graffiti had the Greek symbols for the same letters on it: α2Ω.

"What is all this?" Aster asked. "Why are people writing about me? And what the heck does the alphabet 'A to Z' or the Greek alphabet 'Alpha to Omega' have to do with me?"

Really, were people expecting her to give out free reading lessons or something? And if so, why? She was barely able to take care of her own immediate survival. Why the hell were people writing about her?

Wolfkiller enlightened her. "You're actually famous, you know. Not that you should be, but in times like these, people take their hope and their heroes where they can find them. And the 'only bitch the Maestro ever knelt to'? Not that you wanted him to, but that story spread through the entire city in less than a week. You're the closest thing a lot of people have had to a hero, or to hope, since the Maestro defeated the Hulk, and killed Rick Jones and his rebels."

He looked over at Aster, a scruffy figure in scruffy clothes half slumped on the horse. "The reality's a bit disappointing, I admit, but the people who are writing about you, don't know you. Just your story. It's why I had to come find you. Stories have power, and the Maestro was starting to hear your story, from others. And he didn't much like what he heard. If I hadn't come to get you, he would have, fairly soon."

"Well, thanks." Aster didn't often express gratitude, but saving her life merited it. "So, what's with the alphabet? Or is it a chemical formula?"

"Neither. It's your name." Seeing that Aster was puzzled, Wolfkiller explained further. "A2Z. Aster Aversa, Zookeeper. And probably some biblical reference. People get religion in times like these. It gives them hope. There's some bible verse about the greek letters for A and Z. Alpha and Omega." The man squinted, trying to remember. "I am the Alpha and the Omega. The first and the last. The beginning and the end. They got that from your name straight off. The first and last person the Maestro ever knelt to. It doesn't help that it's from the book of Revelations, and pretty much 90% of the people here are convinced we're living in the end times."

"Oh, for crimminy cramminy." Aster made a sour face. Even though she had thought much the same thing towards the end of her time in the Maestro's palace. The horse she was riding had more sense than some people. Including herself. "I'm not a god or goddess. I'm not even a hero, like the ones in the Hall of Fallen Heroes. What do these people expect me to do, that they're making all this graffiti with me? Blow the Maestro away with a thunderbolt or something? I never really even did anything to make him kneel to _ME_, he was kneeling to hold his son when he died. I was lucky to even survive being his slave, much less get away. I still don't know why he just let me go."

"Neither does anyone else. But they don't need to. People will make legends and find hope, when they're hopeless." He glanced at Aster. "At least you're smart enough to have an honest assessment of yourself and realize exactly how lucky you are to even be alive. But don't go around wasting your time trying to correct what everyone else thinks about you. I know you want to, but it won't work, stories have a life of their own that has little to do with reality, and too many people have heard of your story who never met you, and if and when they do meet you… I'm fairly sure they'll be disabused of all their romantic ideas about you quickly enough. Though if you were smart, you'd _use_ their beliefs about you. If you convince people God is on your side, they'll cooperate with you more readily. And if you want to convince people to help you feed that _Vampire_, you're going to need a _lot_ of cooperation."

"That…" Aster shook her head. "That isn't right. I don't even know if there is a God. And I don't think he's on my side. If he were, my family wouldn't be dead. And I wouldn't have had to do the horrible things I've done to keep myself alive. I don't think it's right to lie to people about that, even if there isn't a God. And if there is a God, I especially don't think it's right."

"You're honest. But impractical." Honesty was of little use in the sort of world they lived in. "You're not going to convince most people with facts, no matter how smart you are."

Aster shook her head. There were other ways to convince people besides lying to them. Weren't there? She remained silent for a few more miles until she and Daniel Wolfkiller came to a small group of wooden shacks near the outer edges of Dystopia where Betty 31's immediate family and the close relatives who had come with them from Milwaukee lives. Such was the Maestro's 'generosity' to them for handing over their daughter to be his sex toy, that he did not force them to live on the Outside. They actually had running water, and as Aster approached the group of poorly built houses, she saw pipes running out towards some fields that from the looks of the stubble in them, had grown potatoes and wheat that year. Probably they had had to give most, or all of the wheat to the Maestro, and the potatoes were for their own consumption.

Other than that, the 'houses' where they lived looked to be about as poorly built as the Post-War equipment sheds at the Zoo. Aster began to realize exactly how privileged her childhood had been. She had thought, a long time ago, that she and her family were poor, because they didn't live in a fancy palace like the Maestro Her house at the zoo had thick, insulated walls, and a real cast iron stove with pipes that ran all through the house to heat it. These houses were made of a single layer of planks, poorly caulked between them with bits of sod that were falling out in places. Probably the wind went right through it in the winter. Instead of a stove pipe, she saw a small fireplace on one side. Definitely a hazard in a wooden house. And the windows, rather than being real plate glass like her house had had, were tiny openings with smudged plastic from pre-war plastic bottles nailed over them.

A man and a teenage boy came out of one of the houses. The man was carrying a rusty rifle, with gouges in the wooden stock. The boy was carrying a long stick, with a carved point. Probably one good jab into a person would wreck the point and it would have to be retargeted. The man aimed the rifle at Wolfkiller, and the boy looked at the horse and licked his lips.

Wolfkiller held up his hand. "I'm here to see Patricia's family. The Millers."

The man didn't lower the rifle. "Do I know you?"

"I'm a friend of Ferdic's."

"Ah." The rifle lowered the barest fraction of an inch. "I'll take you." He glanced at Aster. "A slave? I'll buy her. Give you a quart of moonshine for a night."

"You wouldn't like this one, and she's not for sale." The older man said shortly, and Aster was glad that Wolfkiller was obviously far larger and stronger than the man in front of them."

"Don't know what's not to like about her. Really nice teeth." The man grumbled. But he led the two of them through the little group of houses. Aster looked at his teeth, and Wolfkiller's as well, as he did so. She had never really thought about the fact that she had good teeth, and that a dentist came to her house once a year to look at (and a few times drill on) her teeth, as well as her father's and sisters. There had been a different dentist in the Maestro's palace, who took care of the teeth of the slaves and guards there. But apparently a lot of people, including Daniel Wolfkiller and the unpleasant man in front of them were not so lucky. Their teeth were yellowish, even blackish in some places, and parts of them were chipped. Aster resolved to brush her teeth with a vengeance at least twice a day from then on.

Aster was curious to know who 'Patricia' was. Or 'Ferdic'. Or the 'Millers', for that matter. She almost opened her mouth to ask about it, then thought at the last second that maybe that wasn't such a good idea. Probably a few years earlier she would have asked first and thought about it later. Curiosity had always been a nearly overwhelming force in her. But four years in the Maestro's palace had taught her the value of keeping her mouth shut. If the man in front of them thought that she and Daniel Wolfkiller didn't actually know 'Patricia' or 'the Millers', he might decide to shoot them with his rifle.

Instead, she waiting until the man pointed out a particular house on one side of a large field full of the withered tops of potato plants. "That's the Millers, there." He said, then turned to leave.

Once he was out of earshot Aster asked, "Who's the people you mentioned? Patricia, Ferdic, and the Millers?"

"Patricia?" Wolfkiller looked surprised. "That's Betty 31. Her real name. Patricia Miller. Ferdic was… well they were engaged to be married before they came here. Before the Maestro took her. He got a job as a guard at the palace to be close to her, to give her a way to communicate with her family. I thought you knew."

"No. We weren't allowed to ask each other's real names. Or say them." Aster still felt ashamed. She should have at least tried to find out the real name of the woman she had killed. "I didn't know they - she and the guard - were engaged. I thought she was just stupid. Trading herself and risking getting into trouble just for favors."

"Love makes fools of us all. Some author wrote that, back before the War." He got off the horse, helped Aster off, and tied the horse to a ring that was attached to a pole stuck in the ground, about 20 feet away from the door. He checked the horses mouth for some reason Aster didn't understand, nodded, then motioned for Aster to follow him as he went to knock on the door of the house.

After several moments, a man with hair that had once been red, but now was mostly grey, answered the door. He had a long knife made of wrought iron. It didn't look very sharp.

"What?" He said.

"Mr. Miller? I'm Daniel Wolfkiller."

"Ah!." The knife immediately lowered. "Ferdic's friend… wait a minute." The knife went back up. "Do you think it will rain?"

"The rain in Spain stays mainly in the Plains." Wolfkiller responded. It was obviously a password of some sort, because the long knife now went into the sheath at his belt.

Mr. Miller looked over at Aster. "Your friend's one of the tallest women I've ever seen. Ugly, but tall. Who is she?"

"She's the only bitch the Maestro ever knelt to." Came the answer in a quiet voice. Aster didn't much like being referred to as a _bitch, _but she liked the other man's reaction to the statement even less.

"Bloody hell." Mr. Miller, Betty 31's father, _Patricia's_ father looked like he wanted to go for his knife, and pulled his hand away with an effort of will. "Then you killed my daughter. My little Patty."

"I ought to cut your throat for you. The way you did to my daughter." He squinted angrily at Aster, then glanced over at Wolfkiller, who was nearly a foot taller than him. "But I doubt I'd get two steps towards you before Wolfkiller threw me across the room. And Ferdic told me _why_ you did what you did. It was a mercy. But I still don't like it. Get out."

"What?" Aster honestly didn't understand the command.

"Get Out." The man said pointedly. "I don't want my daughter's killer in my house. Wolfkiller can stay, he's helped Ferdic dozens of times, but I don't know you from Adam and I don't want you here. Get out of my house and go sit by Wolfkiller's horse. You're supposedly a Zookeeper, or something like that. So go by the animals where you belong."

Daniel Wolfkiller's eyes obviously directed her towards the door. Aster wanted to argue about the unfairness of it all, but didn't. The older man knew a lot more about dealing with people than she did, so she'd let him deal with Patricia's angry father. If she tried talking to him, she'd just make him angrier than he already was. And he was obviously pretty angry. Actually, steamingly furious described his mood fairly accurately.

But it sucked, she thought as she left the house and went to sit down on the slightly damp ground near the horse, leaning her back against the pole where it was tied. She wished she could do everything herself, but there were so many things she didn't know how to do, or was afraid to do. She wasn't strong, like the Maestro. She had so many weaknesses. She had trouble dealing with people. She had trouble dealing with heights. Hell, she couldn't even make a decent basket that held more than a pint, or dry fruit properly. It sucked. Why couldn't she be perfect? She was like someone's idea of playing a joke with a poker hand, giving her half the aces and kings in the deck, but also half the twos and threes, forcing her to play to her strengths and find other people, like Wolfkiller, with the missing Aces that she didn't have, and work with them, even though they oftentimes disgusted and annoyed the hell out of her.

The worst part was when she had to explain things to people over and over and over again. Why did it take them so damned long to grasp things that were immediately obvious to her? She knew intellectually that most other people actually did really take that long to understand things. That they really weren't as smart as her. But emotionally, she always had the same impatient reaction, that other people really couldn't _possibly _be that stupid, that they took so long to see what was immediately obvious to her. That they were pretending to be stupid on purpose, in order to annoy her and waste her time explaining the same simple thing over and over again to them, when if she had been dealing with someone like herself, she could have explained about 50 different things in the same amount of time.

Then again… she did have her weaknesses, didn't she. She remembered Daniel Wolfkiller lifting 160 pounds of water the previous night as easily as she would have lifted a canteen, and wondered if he ever got annoyed with people around him. If he ever thought that they were merely _pretending _to be weak in order to waste his time and make him do more work. The situation was similar… but different. You could look at someone's body and at least tell whether they had very many muscles or not. You couldn't look inside their brain and see how smart they were.

Aster waited, sitting on the hard ground. There were several clumps of dead grass growing around, and the horse occasionally munched on them, making a face that reminded her of what she probably looked like eating cold baked possum for supper last night, and for breakfast this morning. There had been no lunch yet, even though from the position of the sun in the sky it was a little past noon. But a lunch of yet more cold baked possum and cold baked beans was really not something to look forward to with any significant degree of anticipation.

Wanting the horse, at least, if not herself, to have something a little better to eat, Aster got up, went several yards over to the remains of an old metal fence, and pulled out a handful of grass that was still greenish. She brought it over to the horse, which immediately began wrinkling it's fuzzy nose and sniffing eagerly. Aster laughed, teased the horse for a few moments, then let it eat the fresher grass. She sat back down against the pole, and the horse sniffed at her, looking for another treat.

"Sorry, too lazy to get more." She told the huge Percheron mixed-breed. "At least you aren't refusing your food, but Wolfkiller said that it's not good to feed you too much."

The horse didn't understand her, and kept sniffing, until Aster gave it a rub above the nose, at which point it apparently decided that petting meant there was no more of the nice green grass for the moment, and went back to sniffing half-heartedly at the dry clumps within it's reach. Aster sat, looking sometimes at the horse, sometimes at the dull grey clouds in the sky which gave off a very occasional snowflake, as if their water content were too valuable to share with a parched planet. Once, a boy with raggedy hair went past a field in front of the next nearest house, pulling off an occasional head of wheat that had been missed by the harvest and throwing it into what looked to be a dirty pillowcase.

Time went by. Maybe half an hour, maybe an hour. The boy got what looked like only a few cups of gleaned wheat in his pillowcase, and went back into his house. The horse got bored with eating dead grass, and stood with it's head down and eye's half closed, occasionally swatting it's tail at a snowflake that landed on it's flanks. Eventually, Wolfkiller came back out, with Patricia's father behind him, looking highly annoyed. An improvement over his earlier mood.

"Daniel here," said the other man, in a dry voice "Has been telling me some rather… interesting… stories about the Maestro. I'm not sure if I believe them."

"What's he been telling you?" Aster asked. "I can tell you if it's true or not."

"I don't need you just 'yessing' whatever he said." The aging man spat on the ground. "I want you to tell me what you say he's doing."

"He's been doing a lot of 'interesting' things lately." Aster said. "He went mad after your daughter miscarried his son."

"I don't want to hear about how my daughter died." The man's graying hair actually seemed to regain some of it's former reddish color, reflecting his flushed cheeks. "I already know more about that than I ever wanted to. I think about it every damn day. I want to know what you say he's been doing since then. The worst parts, not everything. From what Wolfkiller says about you, you're as likely as not to tell me how many eggs he has for breakfast every day, and what he uses to wipe his arse, unless I tell you otherwise."

Aster pulled herself up with the hitching pole. "What do you want to hear?" Her face darkened. "It's a long list. That he was killing people and leaving their bodies to rot where they lay on the floor? That he was burning people alive? That the very night he let me go, he was eating a 6 year old boy for dinner, because the boy's father didn't have any cattle to give him?"

The man said nothing, but his mouth worked.

"Want me to go on?" Aster asked.

"No. Wolfkiler said you were a bitch, and you are." Mr. Miller looked disgusted. "Did you have to put things that… cruelly. You killed my daughter. Don't you care?"

_If I didn't care, I wouldn't have killed her. Doing so actually risked my own life. It would have been safer for me to cut her open while she was still alive, and feeling. _Aster thought. But what she said was: "What would you have had me do instead?"

"Nothing. But you could at least feel a little sorry about it. Instead you sit there, like a stone. You don't even cry."

"No." Aster didn't know what to say to the man. That the Maestro hadn't left her with very many feelings. That she had used up her tears for her own father and sister. That she really hadn't known Betty 31 – Patricia – all that well, and grief and hatred and guilt and love were far too intimate with her to give casually to strangers. She doubted Mr. Miller would care about her own load of troubles or cry over them. "I can't. I wish I could."

She tried to think of what might make the man feel a little better. "Your daughter… she thought she was going to be Queen. The Maestro told her that. I knew it was a lie… that she was going to die… but I let her believe it. She was happy for a few months."

The grey haired man said nothing for a long time. Finally he sighed, with the pain of a burden and guilt carried far too long. "You're a cold bitch, but maybe that's what this place, what the Maestro makes of people. Monsters. We should never have left home. It's my fault. I was afraid of the _Vampire_. We all were. We heard radio broadcasts from here, some nights, and thought it would be better. We knew there was fighting here… but there was no _Vampire. _I thought… if we just kept our heads down, did what the Maestro said, paid him tribute, we'd be fine. We'd be safe. I didn't know that I'd have to pay him more than money. More than blood. I'd have to pay him in flesh. My own daughter. Torn apart. My god, I wish I'd have let the Vampire rip out my own throat rather than come within a thousand miles of this place. What happens next? What does _he _do next. The crops get worse every year. Does he take my other children and eat them?"

Mr. Miller looked like he wanted to sit down on the ground where Aster had been. "Wolfkiller tells me you want to go to Milwaukee, where we came from. And you want us to go with you. Hell of a world. We run here, and you want to run there. I don't really know that _there_ is any better than _here_. I don't know that running away from one set of problems into another set makes things any better."

Aster thought for a minute, staring at the ground. "Betty… Patricia… your daughter once told me that Milwaukee was full of plants and animals. Lots of them. As many as in pre-war pictures. It's not dying, like this place is. The Maestro's killing this place. He's destroyed the zoo. I can't even guess how many species are extinct because of him. He's running out of animals to eat, and starting on the people. This whole place is one big snack for him. We need to get out."

"And get killed by the _Vampire _instead. From what Daniel says, you want him alive. He said you think _he's_ reason everything back home alive. I don't get how that works."

Aster thought for a minute, then asked Mr. Miller what Wolfkiller thought was a very odd question. Though the typical sort of thing he had come to expect from Aster. Something about plants and the crops the raised in Milwaukee. The older man answered her question, and Aster mumbled something under her breath that was hard to make out, it sounded like: "Heal them thus, Morbius." Then she spoke louder.

"I think he did it with bacteria." Aster said. Seeing that Mr. Miller didn't understand, she elaborated. "The _Vampire _was once a scientist. A man called Michael Morbius. A biologist, and a biochemist. I read about it, back in the palace. He must have made bacteria to clean up the radiation. Or altered them, to work better, since there were things like that cleaned up radiation, even before the War. They used them when nuclear power plants had accidents. Before the war, scientists were changing living things, altering their DNA…" She wasn't sure if the old man knew what DNA was, "The instructions inside them that tell them what to do. It's actually how he became a _Vampire. _He was dying of a blood disease and tried to alter himself to cure it. His cure worked.. but it changed him. Made him a _Vampire. _Which sucks, but it proves that he has the skills he would need to do what I think he did. If he can change himself, he can change other living things. And bacteria are *everywhere*. In the air. The water. The soil. In every plant and animal. Like the ones you told me about. Your own body is full of them. If he could change them, he could make them clean up the radiation and the poisons. Keep everything alive."

"Why?" he sneered sarcastically. "Out of the goodness of his heart? Don't make me laugh. He's killed a lot of people. He's a monster."

"Yes… so am I." Aster said. "So I can understand why he would do it. Survival. He needs people to feed on. He needs people alive."

"Great. So he's a fucking cannibal like the Maestro. I don't see much difference." Mr. Miller paused for a moment, an odd _ashamed _expression shading his face for half a second. Then it vanished, and his sneer returned. "So, he's kept us alive, maybe, with these bacteria. I don't see why we need him any more. Why not just kill him, he's done his work, the bacteria will live just fine without him."

"That's just it." Aster said, wondering what that momentary look of shame had been for. Not feeding Morbius, maybe? "He's _not _done with his work. If I'm right about what he did, he's only saved you people in Milwaukee temporarily. Only until the Maestro finds you. And he _will _find you, sooner or later. When he's done with Dystopia, he's going to go looking for someplace else to destroy. The _Vampire's _the only one who can stop him."

Mr. Miller shook his head. "Fuck this god damned world and all the monsters in it. Maybe the human race should just go extinct and let the monsters starve to death. Let the whole planet die. What do I care?"

"There is some difference." Aster said. "The _Vampire _is drinking blood to survive. The Maestro doesn't _need_ to eat people. And he doesn't always kill. From what I've read, and from what your daughter told me, some people at least have survived being bitten by him. You can lose some blood, with no permanent bad effects. Your body eventually makes more. It's possible to feed the Vampire, in theory, without his killing anyone. If enough people will cooperate."

"Yes, well there's the kicker, isn't it. 'If enough people cooperate'. Don't think you know how they think, back home. They want the bastard dead. How are you going to convince them otherwise?"

"I don't know." Aster said. "Do you think they want him dead so badly that they'd prefer the Maestro taking over and let their daughters be raped to death, and their sons roasted on a spit?"

"No." The old man admitted. Again, the flicker of shame. Odd. "They want him dead pretty badly, but not quite that badly. Still going to be a hell of a job convincing them, though… and even if you convince them, why should the _Vampire _go along with it. He's doing just fine the way things are."

"Is he?" Aster said quietly. "Your daughter… Patricia… told me that he screams all the time. That he used to talk… a long time ago, but now all he does is scream. That doesn't really sound like he's very happy to me. Like he enjoys what he's doing. He used to be a doctor, you know. He saved lives. I don't think he likes what he's doing. At all. It's probably pure hell, for him. From what I read about him, he's tried almost everything to cure himself, and none of it worked."

"A doctor…why the hell didn't he just kill himself." Mr. Miller muttered. Again, that momentary look of unfathomable guilt. It faded quickly, he glared at her for a few more unpleasant moments, then turned to Daniel Wolfkiller. "How long does it take to get to these mines you told me about?"

"With women and children…" The younger, taller man appeared to do some calculating in his head. "Three to four days. We need to leave before tomorrow morning. The longer we stay here, the more dangerous it gets. Do you think you'll have any problem convincing the other people you came with?"

"Not most of them. A lot of them have been wanting to go back. The Maestro took some more of our women, you know. When we first came here, he said that we could all stay if we gave him just one girl. So we drew lots. God help us. But we believed him, and we thought… just one girl, for all our lives. We thought it was worth it. But he lied. He's taken more, whenever he wanted them."

"He always lies." Aster said.

"Yes… so a lot of us have been wanting to go back, but haven't found a way. And when they hear the Maestro's been eating people… I don't think any of them will want to stay here any more."

"No. Daniel Wolfkiller nodded. People wanted to go where it was safe. Or, failing that, the least dangerous and unpleasant. One _Vampire _and plenty of food was less dangerous and less unpleasant than one Maestro, and not very much food. "Get them together as soon as you can. I'll talk to them."

Patricia's father, Mr. Miller, continued to snub Aster and made her sit outside in the cold while pointedly inviting Daniel Wolfkiller to have supper with him and his family. She almost felt like a _Vampire _herself, from some of the stories about the supernatural sort of _Vampire. _Something unsafe to invite into your house. Aster dug around in the saddlebags on the horse, but didn't feel like eating anything other than a few slices of dried apples. She smelled fried chicken, and maybe even a pie in the house and in the darkness, looked through the brightly lit windows, hoping maybe someone would invite her in. Or at least take pity on her and bring a little food out for her. But nobody cared, and maybe after the awful thing she had done to Mr. Miller's daughter, Patricia, she didn't deserve to have anyone care. But she still felt bad.

Maybe she wasn't even a real person. Maybe she was really some sort of horrible thing like a _Vampire, _though it didn't seem fair that nobody would tell her what sort, or why. But she didn't feel like a real person, real people had other people who cared about them and invited them in to a nice supper in the light with other people, rather them leaving them outside and hungry and lonely in the cold and dark, and didn't have the horrible things happen to them that she had. And didn't _do _the horrible things that she had, either. Aster lifted up her hand towards the window, as if she could touch the glass from so many yards away, and held it there for a moment, peering at the light between her fingers. Her lip quivered as she looked at the warm light that she wasn't allowed into. She sniffed and lowered her hand to wipe a few tears off her dirty cheeks, then went back to sit alone in the cold darkness with only the hitching post at her back and the dumb horse at her side for company and comfort.

After what seemed to Aster like a very long dinner, Mr. Miller and Daniel Wolfkiller started going to the other houses in the settlement and talking to the people there, getting them together for the meeting that Wolfkiller wanted. There were enough people from Milwaukee that they would not all fit into Mr. Miller's house, and they had to meet later that evening in their communal horse barn. Lacking anything useful to do, Aster helped sweep some of the straw off the floor, so lanterns could be put around without risk of fire. Someone brought in some sort of tan colored bread in thick slices to eat. Aster declined. She was hungry, but the stuff smelled like sawdust, and there was no butter on it. Besides, despite being hungry, she still had a lot more weight on her than most of the people who lived in the shabby settlement.

Eventually, everyone was in the barn who was supposed to be. Patricia's father and Daniel Wolfkiller were both better at talking to people than Aster was, so she sat on a slightly moldy bale of hay for most of the meeting, only coming up to the front when some of the people had questions to ask her about the radiation cleansing bacteria that she thought the _Vampire _had made. Or at least, helped make. She had to acknowledge the possibility, when someone asked her, that there may have been, indeed, likely was, more than one scientist who had worked on creating such a thing. But she was still convinced that Morbius must have done a great deal of the work, mainly because the fact that he was a _Vampire _had let him survive the radiation from the War that had probably killed off any and all of the human scientists that had been working on it.

"The law always said we were to always grow it, and eat it, raw." A man who, from his red hair, seemed to be a close relative of Mr. Miller said after Aster explained why and how the bacteria worked, and why the refugees from Milwaukee hadn't brought it with them to Dystopia. "Both the roots, and the seeds. We didn't mind, we get a good yield from it. And it tastes alright. But I guess that's why."

"Has anyone ever… not followed the law?" Aster asked. She needed to know. "Not eaten it, raw. If so… what happened?"

"Not sure…" The man shrugged. "Everyone eats it, everyone always eaten it as long as I've been alive." The man talking seemed to be in his 30's, though perhaps he was younger. The hard life most people had in the Post-War world tended to age them prematurely. He glanced over at Patricia's father, Mr. Miller. "Do you know, Uncle?"

The older man made a sour face, as if loathe to even talk to his daughter's murderer, let alone give her a scrap of information. "Not firsthand." He finally said. "Though I heard tell that just after the war, some people didn't eat it. Or plant it. Got sick, and sometimes died. Their livestock died, too. And some of the boats going to Michigan back then, didn't want to carry it. Thought they'd live on just fish. They got sick, and sometimes died, too. Everyone's eaten it since then. Nobody wants to get sick."

Aster glanced significantly at Wolfkiller her mouth set in a rather satisfied expression, though the older man merely looked pained at her smug look. What she had thought was keeping the people, animals, and plants in the area around Milwaukee was definitely appearing more and more to be the truth. And something else that Mr. Miller had said, aroused her curiosity. He had said there were boats going to Michigan. Aster didn't understand why. What was in Michigan that wasn't in Wisconsin? That they would need so badly that they'd risk death for it? It was probably important to know, eventually, and she was dying of curiosity about it, but she really didn't need to know at the immediate moment, so she held her tongue.

There was a great deal more talk at the meeting, and more questions. Aster also learned more about how the bacteria must work, from various things told to her by Patricia's family and friends. In the end, Aster had to stand in front of everyone and describe the worst of the acts she had seen the Maestro commit, during her final year in the Palace. After that, there was a vote. It was unanimous. Everyone wanted to go back where they had come from. They preferred the risk of radiation during the trip, the risk of the _Vampire, _in fact, they preferred the Devil himself and his mother-in-law as well, to the risk of what the Maestro was going to be up to next.

The agreement regarding Aster's claim that they needed the _Vampire _alive, to finish his work, and to kill the Maestro, was considerably less unanimous. There was a lot of discussion, interspersed with the same, brief, puzzling, looks of _shame_ that Aster had seen on Mr. Miller's face earlier. She didn't understand what they meant, most people in the Post-War world were not such great fonts of compassion that they would be likely to feel any great distress at not voluntarily feeding the _Vampire. _But finally Aster decided it didn't matter. Most people in these times had been forced to do _something _they were ashamed of, often more than once, in order to survive. Aster herself was no exception, and probably she just didn't understand the culture of the people from Milwaukee enough to fathom what it was about the current topic that would remind them of it.

She turned her attention to listening to the talk. Some of the people thought Aster was rather foolish in her beliefs, and didn't understand just how dangerous the _Vampire_ really was, but they'd help her at least catch the damned thing, and if she could get the _Vampire _to stop killing, and cooperate with and protect them, great. If not, they'd simply pound a stake through his rotten heart, which is what they should have done years ago, anyways. Others, being more superstitious and less practical, thought that Aster's survival of the Maestro was proof of some sort of divine intervention, and disagreeing with her regarding the _Vampire _might be contrary to the Will of God.

Aster didn't really care, either way. But honesty led her to say: "I don't really know if God is on my side. So many bad things have happened to me, that it doesn't seem like it. But I can't really say that God isn't on my side. I don't know what God thinks. Or even if there is a God. I just need help to catch him. I'll be glad for your help, no matter what your reasons for it are. After that, it'll be up to me to try and control him. If I can."

This seemed to satisfy everyone, despite Daniel Wolfkiller's earlier warnings that people would only cooperate with her regarding catching the _Vampire alive _if she lied to them and used their religious beliefs to trick them. Well, maybe whatever it was they all seemed ashamed of had motivated them into helping her out of guilt of some kind. Whatever the reason, she was glad of it, and would not risk ruining it by asking them exactly what they had to be ashamed or guilty over, when they obviously seemed to not want to talk about it. After going back to the bale of hay where she had been sitting, Aster pulled a face at the scarred, former stablemaster, when he wasn't looking. At least, she thought she hadn't been looking, but maybe he was, because he gave her a nasty glare in return. Well, screw him. She didn't know if God was on her side, and wasn't going to lie about it. Besides, even if God were on her side, he probably _wouldn't _be any more, if she told lies and set herself up as some sort of little God. And fair was fair. As long as people and their religious beliefs -true or otherwise - left her alone, she would leave them and their religious beliefs alone.

The children in the little community (which was considered to be anyone under 10 years old) had not attended the meeting, and were allowed to sleep while the adults, who had decided to return to where they came from, began packing up wagons full of things they would need. Mainly food, livestock, a few changes of clothing, and treasured personal belongings. Plus weapons. Wolfkiller had strictly insisted that they take every weapon they had. Aster was somewhat of a help during the process. She was taller and stronger than any of the other women, and unlike them, was able to lift sacks of grain and crates of jarred fruit onto wagon beds by herself. Of course, Daniel Wolfkiller was strong enough that he could lift two sacks of grain at a time, and probably could have done more, if only he had had more hands. The huge man made it a point to work near Aster, as if to make sure that she didn't say or do anything so peculiar that it would frighten Patricia's people out of their decision to return with Wolfkiller to the Catskill mountains, and eventually to Wisconsin.

"Most of this will be gone in a month." Wolfkiller shook his head, as the wagons were packed.

Aster looked at what seemed to her to be a huge amount of food. "There's so much."

"It's not that much." Wolfkiller corrected her. "Not for as many people as this. And the animals… don't tell them, but most of them are going to get eaten. We don't have enough food where we're going to feed it to animals. And we're going to need a lot more, before we return to Wisconsin. Enough to feed everyone for a year, at least."

Aster looked again at the food being put onto the wagons. The bags of grain felt like they were corn, and weighed between 30 and 40 lbs each. For one person, or a single family, it would have been a lot. But put in that perspective, enough to last all these people, plus however many friends Daniel Wolfkiller had back at the Catskill Mountains, for a year, it did seem like a puny amount.

"Where are you going to get that much food?" She asked Wolfkiller.

"Who has the most food in this godforsaken city?" she was asked in return.

"Ah." Now she understood why Wolfkiller had insisted that these people bring every weapon they had. "Dangerous. He's going to be pissed."

"He's already pissed." Wolfkiller said. "It can't really get any worse than it already is."

"Well, actually, it could." Aster said, but she didn't elaborate on how it could, and Wolfkiller didn't want to know. Or at least, he didn't ask her. He worked in silence, throwing several more sacks of grain onto a wagon bed.

"So, that's another reason you came looking for me." Aster finally said. "If you're going to rob him, you need a map. You're using me, again."

"Yes." Wolfkiller threw more sacks of grain onto the wagon. The pile was getting pyramid shaped. "You do have your uses. Despite your foolishness, you do have your uses. You should have let those people think you were a divine agent. It was risky, telling them the truth."

"I don't like lying."

"Learn to like it." Wolfkiller's voice was harsh. "Learn to use people, or you'll never get anything done."

"Use me." Aster laughed. "Ha! Did you ever think of _asking _me? Not to be your spy, back when I was 14, I understand why you didn't want to give information to me when I was that young, but honestly, Daniel, did it ever occur to you that I might _want _to be your living map, to the Maestro's palace."

The large man gaped at her in surprise, and Aster went on. "Oh yes. I do. That bastard took everything from me. My virginity. My innocence. My sanity. My family. My husband, whoever he might have someday been. So I'm going to take everything from _him_. One piece at a time. Starting with this."

"You are a bitch." But the tone was admiring. The stacks of grain on the wagon got too high for Aster to reach the top, and she began handing the sacks of grain to the much taller Daniel Wolfkiller instead. "And ambitious. Probably not very realistic, but definitely ambitious."

"Tell me something," Wolfkiller said after a while. "You said something earlier, when you were talking to Patricia's father. It sounded like a prayer, but you don't seem the type to pray. Especially in public."

"A prayer?" Aster's brows crinkled together in confusion. "Not sure what you mean. I didn't pray in front of him."

"You said something like: 'Heal them thus, Morbius.'" What was that? Praying to a vampire? Or for him? Did you say: 'Heal him thus'? Asking God to intercede for a _Vampire?_

"Oh!" Now Aster understood. Not knowing Latin, Wolfkiller hadn't understood what she had said. Not that she wouldn't have asked God, privately, to help her, if she had thought God was listening, and that it would do any good. She had prayed for her father and sister, after all. Not that that had helped any that she could see, either. "It wasn't a prayer. It was a plant."

"A plant?" Surprising, but knowing Aster, it shouldn't have been.

"One of the main crops they're growing around Milwaukee. And what I'm pretty sure is the host plant for the bacteria that clean up the radiation. Probably a cross between Helianthus Annus and Helianthus Tuberosi. Possibly polyploidal. Call it Helianthus Morbiusii. I just thought it was funny."

Wolfkiller had no idea what the Latin names for the plants referred to, or what 'polyploidal' meant. But humor, even Aster's odd humor, interested him. Besides, it was conversation. "I'm sure that's all sciencey and all. But what's so funny about it?"

"Well, it's just ironic." Aster handed him another sack , but it didn't feel like corn. More like hickory nuts, the same sort she had gathered up for the winter at the Zoo. The winter she had never spent there. "That a creature of darkness would, of all things, make a genetically engineered sunflower."


	22. Chapter 22

Chapter 22. The Passage

Apparently in the opinion of Patricia's father and friends, Aster was good for being a sort of walking encyclopedia and doing manual labor, but not much else, as after the meeting, she was again snubbed, and nobody invited her to sleep in their house. Patricia's father (whose name apparently was 'Dave' as Aster heard a few people call him that) gave Aster another nasty look of hatred mixed with a hint of guilt as he left the barn with Daniel Wolfkiller. Aster still didn't get what that was about. She shot her own nasty look through the closing barn door as the man left, and flapped her arms. It was cold in the barn, but she would make do. They had, at least, left her a couple lanterns, so she wasn't in the dark, and Aster took one and begin looking around the barn. There were some empty burlap sacks piled in one corner that would do for blankets. Aster took a handful of them, wrapped them around her body as best as she could, burrowed under a pile of straw for warmth, and despite the cold and her growling stomach, soon went to sleep.

She awoke even colder, but could tell by the dim blue light peeking between the boards of the barn that it was almost dawn. There was no point in trying to get back to sleep. Aster slid the barn door open a bare 18 inches, slipped out, and crouched down behind a stunted bush to empty her bladder. There were lights on in all the houses, and the smells of breakfast. Mostly oatmeal and apples, but she caught a hint of eggs. No sausages or bacon like she had often had for breakfast back at the Maestro's palace, or even sometimes back at the zoo.

_Fuck it. _She thought. At least she wasn't taking part in one of the Maestro's cannibal feasts, or worse yet, ending up on his menu. The thought of the smelly, cold oppossum meat in Daniel Wolfkiller's saddlebags actually made her stomach growl. She pulled the jar of the stuff out of the supplies, and opened it. It still tasted and smelled as bad as she remembered. She ate it anyways, and got rid of the taste with a few slices of dried apples. Her mouth still tasted bad, and felt sticky, so she went over to the rusty bucket of water someone had put out for the horse, and drank from there.

There were sounds coming from the houses, of furniture being moved around, and people running back and forth. Probably last minute packing, as Wolfkiller had made it clear that he wanted everyone to start out in the morning. She was fairly sure that Wolfkiller wouldn't leave her behind, he seemed to think she was a fairly useful tool, but she didn't trust Patricia's father, Dave Miller, or any of his friends or relatives, either. She was still unsure what that odd look of shame she kept seeing on their faces signified, but she didn't like it. People often hated thinking about bad things they had done themselves even more than they hated the people who had done bad things to them, and she wasn't sure if anyone would try to leave her behind or arrange an accident for her, so that they wouldn't have to think about whatever guilty secret her talk of the _Vampire _seemed to remind them of. And she still didn't get what it might be. The _Vampire _had been attacking and occasionally killing them, so it seemed to Aster that they should be angry, not ashamed. Or maybe she was just misinterpreting what she saw on their faces. She had a hard time understanding what other people felt, much of the time.

The dawn light was getting brighter, and Aster made out the shape of some dead saplings on one side of the Miller's property, near their fence. Young trees often didn't make it in these times, especially if they weren't watered. Aster went over by them, and wiggled their trunks, until she found one, about an inch and a half in diameter, that seemed fairly solid. She pushed it hard, and the trunk bent slightly rather than breaking. Good, it wasn't rotted. It took Aster about 15 minutes of carving with her knife to whittle the bottom of the trunk thin enough to snap the tree off near the base. There was a shout from the house at the noise, and a moment later the door flew open and she saw someone's face - Patricia's father, it looked like, peering out the door, but all he saw was Aster near his clump of trees, so after shooting her what she was sure was another nasty look, the door slammed shut again with a loud 'Bang'.

It took Aster only another 15 minutes to snap off the few spindly branches from the tree trunk, and whittle their stumps away. The trunk was long, about 12 feet, which was inconvenient, so Aster removed the top as well. Now she had a 6 foot staff. She grasped it in both hands, and swung it. Aster grinned. It reminded her of some of the _Robin Hood _stories in her old book of fairy tales, back when she had been little. Robin Hood and his men had often gotten into fights with quarterstaffs. There was one where Robin Hood had fought Little John, or maybe it was Friar Tuck, on a bridge, and one of them had gotten a good clout with a staff and fallen into a stream. That had always made her laugh, when she had read it, especially with the picture in the book of a green-clad yeoman sitting in a foot or so of water with wet hair dripping over his face and a surprised expression.

Aster had never been trained to use a quarterstaff, but she didn't think that very many other people in Dystopia had, either. Weapons were Pre-War guns, if you were lucky, Post-War guns or electrowhips if you were either _very _lucky or worked for the Maestro. If you weren't so lucky, weapons were knives, bows, axes, clubs, and spears. It wasn't much of a selection, when you thought about it. There were a lot of weapons mentioned in Aster's old books of fairytales that probably could have been made, but most people didn't know about the majority of them, and didn't really know how to use the ones they did know about. Swords. Slings. Maces. Staffs like the one she had made. It was bizarre, when you thought about it. Most of the people in Dystopia knew more about the weapons that they couldn't make, such as bombs and tanks, than they did about a lot of the ones they could have made. Or maybe not so bizarre. The War, and the weapons used in it, were one of the most common topics of conversation in Dystopia. Go into any tavern in Dystopia, and you could almost be assured of finding at least one conversation about the weather, and one conversation about the War. But knowledge of the Old, old world, before all the machines, was not common. Very few children had grown up reading books of fairytales, like Aster. Increasingly, very few children were growing up reading much at all, or even being taught to read.

The staff cheered her up, as she gave it a few more swings. The weight and length both seemed good. Yesterday, she had had almost nothing except her clothing, her picture of her family, and her bow and arrows. Now she had a second weapon, one she could get out to use much faster than she could a bow. It took at least several seconds to string a bow to get it ready for use. Not a problem when you were hunting deer or rabbits, but definitely a problem if someone was coming at you with a club or knife. Aster had no delusions that she had any sort of skill in using the thing the way Robin Hood or Friar Tuck would have, but giving someone a clout on the head or a good poke with the butt of it would definitely put a hurt on them. And it had a longer reach than a knife, axe, or club. Maybe she could even find something to put a point on it. Or make something. There was a lot of pre-war metal lying around all over the place. If she got a piece, maybe 1/8 of an inch thick, filed it into a point, and used a hammer to make sort of a sleeve on the bottom, she could slide it over one end of her staff and make it into a spear, if she wanted to. And keep it hid if she didn't want to, that way people would think she just had a just a plain old wood staff, and not know that she could turn it into a spear in just a second, if she needed to.

_Brilliant._ She decided. The sun was peeking above the horizon now, and people were coming out of their houses. Daniel Wolfkiller and a few other men began doing something Aster found odd, they knocked down some of the fences, and let a few thin looking cattle (which had previously been intended at some point to be tribute to the Maestro) loose. A few they slaughtered on the spot and a quick butchering removed the best, fattiest cuts of meat from them. One house was set on fire, and the other livestock was let loose, and some (though not all) were butchered as well. Aster watched this random destruction for a while, and decided they were probably covering their tracks. Good idea. What was left behind would give whoever might investigate the vanishing of the settlement's population a few different plausible explanations, including being raided, or leaving due to some emergency, or for other areas in or near Dystopia that might be (for whatever reason) preferable to their current locale. Not that it was legal, strictly speaking, for anyone to move from their current location to a different location without the permission (or direct orders to do so) from the Maestro, but it was a law that was ignored fairly often. Usually, provided that a person had not specifically been exiled to the Wastelands by the Maestro, and didn't attempt to move into the better part of the city, near his palace, he didn't really care where they went. At least, he hadn't in the past. Given his current madness, it was hard to guess what the Maestro might decide to take offense at.

Despite Wolfkiller's directive of the previous night that they were to leave early in the morning, that didn't happen. Of course. Aster could have told Wolfkiller that if he wanted to move out at first light, to have the people staying up all night to make preparations. It was hard to decide what to pack for a one way trip. Aster derived no small amount of amusement from watching the former stable master running from one house to the other, screaming at people that NO, they could not bring their furniture, or more than two changes of clothing, or any toys for their children. One woman stood in her yard screaming that she absolutely HAD to bring the 6 pre-war silk dresses her husband had found for her under a fallen shelf in a pre-War department store, despite Wolfkiller's insistence that they were completely impractical for any situation or weather, and they didn't have room for them. Finally, Wolfkiller settled the matter by snatching the dresses out of the woman's hands, ripping them to shreds in a few swift gestures, and throwing the remains into a nearby, partly frozen mud puddle.

The woman began screaming. Her screams got even louder, when Wolfkiller opened up the crude wooden trunk next to her, dug through it, and tossed out 3 pairs of high heeled shoes.

"You can leave without the shoes, or stay here with them." The large man told her bluntly. "Either way, we're not taking them. If you have any sort of boots, I'd suggest you get those. It's cold and getting colder."

The people had very few books, and the ones they did have, were all tossed out, other than a few 'Family Bibles' that Wolfkiller relented on, provided they actually had births and deaths written in them. Other than that, he told them that if they had actually read the books, they could bloody well remember what they read, and if they hadn't read the books, then they couldn't be all that important anyways.

Far more was left, than brought along. One heavy item that he did tell people to bring, were a few iron stoves. They drastically improved the efficiency of any fuel for either cooking or heating, and it was unclear whether they would ever be able to manufacture more. A few crude looms were left behind. They were made of wood and scrap metal, and could probably be duplicated, if necessary. Aster was surprised that there was no talk of spinning wheels, but it seemed there weren't any in any of the houses. Perhaps the people didn't know what a spinning wheel was. Aster probably wouldn't have known, if it hadn't been mentioned in several of her old fairy tales. And she had no idea how to make or use one. She wasn't sure if anyone did. Most clothing and fabrics were either of pre-War manufacture, or made in the Maestro's palace by complex machines. She looked over at the oppossum fur vest that Wolfkiller was wearing. Unless someone, soon, figured out how to make cloth with spinning wheels and stuff, everyone left in the human race would probably be wearing fur and leather within another few generations.

Most of what was brought, other than food, were woodworking and blacksmithing tools, that could be used to make things. Or used to make the tools that were used to make things. At Aster's suggestion, they packed a fair selection of seeds of various crops and flowers that the people said did not grow (or at least they thought not) back in Wisconsin, since some of them might both be useful, and survive there, despite the colder climate. There was one wagon with several boxes that contained bottles of high-proof liquor, carefully packed in straw. Good for bribes, or disinfecting cuts.

Finally, around 10 am, everything was packed. Wolfkiller said to Patricia's father that probably at least some mistakes had been made in packing. They had almost certainly brought some things that they wouldn't need, and forgotten some things that they would. But there was no way to predict the future. Sometimes, you just had to live with the mistakes you made, and deal with the consequences as they came along as best as you could. Most of the horses were either pulling a wagon, or tied behind one. A few were killed with rifle shots, or axe blows to the head, and left in random spots on the ground. Aster sat on the back of the wagon Wolfkiller was driving, hunched between a box and the back of the wagon, her arms pulled into her furry vest for warmth. As the horse-drawn vehicle pulled down the muddy road, Aster glanced back at the little group of houses they were leaving. Between the deliberate vandalism, the slaughtered and released livestock, and the burning house, it looked like it had been hit by raiders, either before or after the people who lived there had left.

It looked sad. All those houses, as shabby as they were, had once been the home to these people, but now they were empty. Like the Zoo. Probably nobody would ever live there again, any more than any people or animals would ever again live in the Zoo. The population of Dystopia was going down, every year. Between the poor crop yield, the theft of the best of the crops and livestock by the Maestro, the claiming of the healthiest boys and girls to serve as the Maestro's slaves, the low fertility and high mutation rate of the remaining humans, especially those who lived in or near the Wastelands, people were gradually dying out. And the new unpleasant tendency of the Maestro to cannibal feasts could only make things worse, not better.

Probably in less than 5 years, what was left of the settlement would be as overgrown as what was left of the Zoo, with weeds and brush and stunted saplings growing in what was now fields, gardens, pastures, and people's yards. They passed the last house in the settlement, and Aster saw a tire hung from a tree by a rusty chain, barely swaying in the cold wind. A crude swing that some man had put up for his children. One of the only treats of childhood that still existed in the world. Right now, she could see ruts in the dirt underneath, made by the feet of whatever child played on it. She could envision it in 5 years, the ruts filled with dirt and grown over, dry grape vines covering the tire and creeping up the length of the chain. In 50 years, the chain would perhaps be rusted through, and the tire fallen to the ground and nearly buried by dirt and brush. Or the tree might have died, and fallen to the ground, taking the tire swing with it. In 500 years, maybe there'd be new trees, and squirrels and oppossums might dig around the tire, to hide nuts or make a den. Would people hunt them? Aster didn't think so. She didn't think there would be anyone left in Dystopia, in 500 years. And if she couldn't find the way, the one, slim, barely possible way she had seen for the _Vampire, _Morbius, to kill the Maestro, likely there would be no people left in the whole world. Once the Maestro finished destroying what he had built in Dystopia, he would turn to destroying what others had manage to build. In Milwaukee. And Iceland. And whatever other small corners of the world where enough people had managed to survive and salvage what they could from what the War had left.

After that, maybe the Maestro would finally starve to death. Or finally go mad enough, far too late, to destroy himself or meet with some unfathomable accident severe enough to kill him. In 5 million years, or maybe 50 million, maybe something else would evolve to live on the planet and make new houses and tools and stories. Maybe the descendents of the opossums that humans ate and skinned for their fur. Or the descendents of the vampire bats that Morbius had experimented with. Maybe they'd dig around and find the remains of the tire or other things made by people. Aster wasn't sure whether anything would last that long. Maybe some things would, and would be found, someday. But not by people.

Aster smiled slightly, envisioning what a future Desmodus Rotundus descended archeologist might make of a tire swing. Bats liked to hang upside down. If they evolved intelligence, while retaining that habit, maybe they would think that whoever made the swing meant it to hang upside-down from. Unless human skeletons lasted that long, and were found, so they had some idea of the normal posture and range of motion of people, there was no reason for them to think otherwise.

The train of wagons went past the outskirts of Dystopia. Most people gave them a slightly curious glance, then turned back to whatever they were doing. Wagons were a common sight. The only thing that drew curiosity was such a large number of them, and so thoroughly packed. Wolfkiller had given all the drivers an answer to give anyone who asked questions, about how their crops had been poor for several years, and they were going to resettle near the ocean, perhaps near the mouth of a small river. and give fishing a try, not that the fishing was likely to be any better, their luck being as bad as it was. This satisfied most people. Migration within the bounds of Dystopia and the wastelands was common, if not technically legal. Unless you were favored by the Maestro, the living was not good anywhere, and it was quite common for farmers to decide to try their hand at fishing, or for fishermen to decide to try their hand at farming, or for the truly desperate to come up with bizaare schemes almost certainly doomed to failure and death, like (so said one man they met) re-opening a Pre-War candle factory, which his two uncles had apparently attempted back when he was a child.

The man took a drink from a small flask that took out of his pocket, swallowed, then spat on the ground, ran his hand through his greasy, mostly grey hair, and offered his opinion that both his uncles, along with their wives, children, and the rest of the population of the world, were mad fools, and who would open a candle factory anyways, when most people made their own candles from left over fat, or had oil lanterns, and anything better such as beeswax was simply ungettable unless you worked for the Maestro, or were filthy rich, which amounted to one and the same thing, and oh, what was the world coming to, and Daniel Wolfkiller and everyone else in the wagon train were all mad fools, as the fishing wasn't going to be any better than the farming, and pretty soon they'd all be eating rats and beetles, regardless of where they were or what they did, right before they all starved to death, so they would have been better off sparing themselves the effort and staying and starving where they had come from and really should go back to.

Daniel thanked the man politely for his advice, but said that since they'd already packed everything and left, they'd go try their hand at fishing anyways. At least for a few years. The man shrugged, apparently resigning himself to the assorted mad schemes of the fools the world was sadly filled with, and they left him in the dust behind the wagons as they moved on. Occassionally, they would encounter what looked like groups of bandits, who regarded the high piles of goods in the wagons with obviously greedy expressions, but after taking in the number of people and weapons in the wagon train, looked as nervous as they were greedy, and did not offer to molest them. Sometimes they would pass clumps of houses, settlements like the ones they had left. Sometimes the houses were well built, other times they were even shabbier than the ones than the wood shacks that they had come from. A few houses looked to be made of old, Pre-War junk, nailed together and gaps in the pieces stuffed with rags, or bits of sod.

One settlement they passed actually consisted of old railroad box-cars that had somehow been moved (perhaps by truck, perhaps by teams of large horses like the Percheron hybrid Wolfkiller owned), set on top of concrete blocks, and holes cut in them for doors and windows that looked to have been salvaged from Pre-War buildings. The box car settlement actually looked fairly prosperous, there were wooden, peaked roofs above each box-car, to keep the rain and snow off it, colorful curtains in the salvaged windows, and there was a large pen full of turkeys in front of almost every long, narrow house. Aster found it odd that they were keeping turkeys, rather than the much faster growing and breeding chickens that most people kept, if they kept any poultry at all, then shrugged. People had come up with all sorts of weird solutions for surviving the world they lived in now, and living in train cars and raising turkeys was neither the oddest, nor the most unpleasant thing she had ever seen in her life, or was likely to see in the future.

Aster couldn't help but feel sad, as the box-car settlement fell out of sight behind them. They actually seemed to be doing fairly well, box cars were solid and warm, and some of the houses looked like they were really made of two box-cars, with their long sides set together. It wouldn't last, though. The place was out of the way, set in an odd curve in the road, and judging by the way the road was overgrown, not very many people came this way. But it didn't matter. It was still part of Dystopia, and sooner or later, the Maestro would find them, and take away their turkeys, their women, their children, and everything else they had. Then they'd probably end up doing what the drunk they met earlier suggested, and eating rats and beetles before they starved to death. She wished that there were a way to bring the people from the box-cars with them, but it was impossible. She couldn't warn everyone they met what the Maestro was doing, or sooner or later, the Maestro would hear about it. Nor could she tell people about the little island of life in Wisconsin, where it _might _be safe to go and live. It was only safe because the Maestro didn't know that it existed, or that they were going there.

Probably he'd find the place anyways, sooner or later, but if he knew about it, or that they were going there, or if too many people vanished from Dystopia all at once, it would be sooner, rather than later. And Aster it to be later. She needed time. Time to find the _Vampire. _Time to get him to do what he needed to do. Time for _her _to do what she needed to do, as difficult and costly as it would be. Time. Time bought, probably, at the cost of the lives of almost everyone they were leaving behind in Dystopia. Aster didn't really know more than a few of them, and those few, not all that well. There was the woman in the Maestro's palace who had once lent Aster a needle. A few guards who looked the other way when she snuck food out of the Palace kitchen. The people who sold meat and fruit and tools in the market square in Dystopia. The old man who had once worked in the Library, when Aster had been a child, and had gotten books off the high shelves for her. Perhaps he was even dead. Perhaps they all were, but if they weren't, they would be soon. It sucked. The world sucked. But neither Aster and her clever mind, nor Daniel Wolfkiller and his strength and leadership, nor even Dave Miller and his snotty looks could save more than the few people they were going to save. If they tried to save more than that few, they'd fail, and doom the rest of the world in the attempt.

As evening came, it became obvious that they had left Dystopia, and were Outside, or in the Wastelands. The few houses they saw looked more shoddily constructed than the equipment sheds at the zoo, were surrounded by fields of stunted crops, and there was very little livestock. Livestock was a luxury. It took three pounds of grain to produce one pound of chicken meat. Grain that people could eat themselves. Of course, you could feed some animals on fodder such as grass, that people couldn't eat. But grass didn't grow that well in the Outside, either. And any livestock would have had to compete with wild animals for the grass. Livestock had been bred for thousands of years to be dependent on and subservient to human beings. That did not make for a good ability to compete with wild animals for scarce food. What little wild greenery there was around went mainly to rabbits and the occasional stunted deer.

The few people they saw were fearful. Probably they thought that such a large caravan either had been sent by the Maestro, or was part of a rebellion against him. The latter was fairly accurate, but either way, it was dangerous for them. They ran into their houses at the sight of the line of wagons, slammed the doors, and no more was seen of them as the wagons passed, except a few fearful eyes peeking from narrow cracks in shuttered windows. Aster made a note of the windows. Apparently those exiled to the Outside by the Maestro could not afford glass. They had to choose between darkness, and whatever weather conditions might happen to exist at the time.

As they passed one house that was closer to the rutted, dirt trail than most of them, Aster noticed a bad smell. She wrinkled her nose, sniffed, and looked around. The bad smell was coming from a ditch between the house and the trail. Whoever lived in the house had been using the ditch as a combination garbage disposal and sewer, and there were piles of rotting vegetable waste, several small animal bones, and a great deal of ordure all rotting in shallow water. Aster looked at the ditch and shook her head. It was hard to tell with the light getting dim, but it looked like it stretched on for some distance, and probably joined with a stream at some point. Sooner or later, someone was going to get sick from contaminated water.

This disturbed her enough, that she poked her head up over the level of boxes, and asked Daniel Wolfkiller whether they couldn't dig proper outhouses and a pit for burning the garbage. He shook his head.

"They all die quick, out here. From starvation. From thirst. From radiation poisoning. Sickness is just one more item on the list. There's too many problems, and not enough people or resources to deal with them all. Oh, certainly if several of them got together, they could dig holes and clean up the trash and shit, but to what end? They'd die just as quickly, from something else. So why go to all that work?"

"I don't know." There was an obscene dampness surrounding the ditch, and animal tracks as well. Aster didn't like to think of hunting and eating animals that had been drinking water from there. "The houses here are far apart, but there are a fair number of people. If they all worked together, they could maybe fix most of the things, except the radiation. They could even use the ditches for irrigation, instead of a crap pit, get more crops. Or something."

"They could, but they won't." Wolfkiller shook his head. "Working together for something that won't pay off for months, or even years, takes hope for the future. Hope, and trust in the people you're working with. They don't have a whole lot of either, around here. The Maestro's stolen it from them."

Wolfkiller sighed, and turned the horses slightly to the right, just past a small boulder. Most likely it had been placed as a marker. "I've tried to get people from here to join the ones I'm with. Mostly, it hasn't worked out well. A few of them have said they'd go with me, but tried to rob me of whatever I had in a day or two."

"What did you do?" Aster asked.

"What I had to." The man said nothing for a few moments. "I can't really live without food and water, or with a cut throat, and it's foolish to keep someone alive who would take all of the first, or try to give me the second. Now, the people here know better than to try and rob or kill me, but they really won't talk to me any more at all."

"They probably love you as much as Dave Miller loves me, hmm?" Aster suggested.

Wolfkiller snorted and choked. That was about as close to an actually funny joke as he had ever heard Aster come. "Yes, they love me just as much as that." He glanced back, his eyes twinkling slightly. "No more than that, mind you. But probably just as much."

Soon after that, it was nearly dark, and they pulled the wagons off the trail and behind some small hills with saplings growing on them. That way, they couldn't be seen from the trail. They couldn't risk any light, though, which meant no fires and no lanterns. It didn't bother anyone, they could make their way fairly well by the light of the half moon, and there wasn't really anyplace they needed to go, anyways. Some of the men took turns in 2 hour shifts surrounding the group of wagons in a circle, keeping watch in case anyone did manage to stumble across their hidden camp. Aster, being a woman, was not so burdened. Or so privileged, depending on your point of view. She was tired, and really didn't want to help keep watch, anyways. She wanted rest. She managed to clear a space in the wagon large enough to lie down in by stacking a few boxes on top of eachother, wrapped herself in a few blankets, and went to sleep.

The next morning, Aster was awoken to some loud rustling and snapping noises. Worried that they were somehow being attacked, she grabbed her wooden staff, but then saw that the noise was just some of the travellers picking small apples they had found still clinging to the branches of the trees surrounding them. Wolfkiller was walking around and making sure that the apples got divided 'fairly'. Aster wasn't quite sure what 'fairly' meant, as some people seemed to be getting far more apples than others, and she was only given a handful of crabapples that were no bigger than grapes. She unstacked the boxes that she had moved to make a sleeping spot, so they wouldn't fall over when the wagon began moving again, then sat and nibbled on the withered fruit.

"We'll have to make a note of this place." She hear Daniel Wolfkiller say at one point. "Apples are hard to get. I wonder why there are so many here. Someone must have planted them."

Aster got up, and tramped around on the frosty grass, looking at the trees, taking note of everything she saw. "Nobody planted these trees, specifically. But this place used to be an orchard. The original trees have died, but you can still see some of their stumps, or mushrooms around where their stumps used to be, all in rows."

She pointed out what she meant. "These trees seeded from them. Who knows how many years ago. Some of them could be maybe the tenth generation from the original orchard trees."

Daniel Wolfkiller frowned at this. He was good at finding spoor, but that was animal spoor. It hadn't occurred to him that plants could sometimes be tracked, as well. It normally wasn't necessary, since plants just stayed in the same place, rather than running and hiding, like animals. This was a different sort of tracking, through time, rather than space. A typical Aster sort of thing to think of, but not all that different from hunting. "If this was an orchard, why are most of the apples so tiny. Crabapples, a lot of them. I don't think they grew those in orchards, and I don't think even ten generations is enough for them to get so stunted. Even with the radiation."

"Apples aren't like people and animals. They have really complex genetics." She could see that the large man didn't understand. "A baby apple tree, grown from a seed, most of the time doesn't grow apples anything at all like the parent tree. A parent tree with big apples can have a baby tree that grows crabapples. Or, vice versa. When people planted orchards, they would always use trees that were grown from cuttings… from branches of good apple trees that they put in water until they grew roots. That way they would be exactly like the parent tree, and have apples that were the same."

"So that's why…" Wolfkiller frowned. "I didn't know that. Nobody knew that. People have been trying to grow apples for a long time, since the war. Planting seeds. And most of the trees were crap. Crabapples. A fucking waste, after all the years needed to grow them."

"It's in books." Aster pointed out.

Wolfkiller sighed. "Books. You've probably read more books than anyone else in the entire state. Except maybe the Maestro. And I'm hardly going to chat _him _up about farming. But there aren't that many books outside Dystopia. Most people can't read, out here, they wouldn't have much time to read if they could, and they've been used for kindling."

"Burning books!" Aster was shocked.

"Better than burning wood they can use to build things with, my dear." Wolfkiller said. "At least from their point of view."

The apples were mostly picked now, except for a few stragglers on high branches that were out of reach. The last few were divided up 'fairly', which meant Aster got another small handful and other people got a large sack. Two runners went out to the trail and came back several minutes later, declaring that it was safe to leave.

"I'm going to get you some notebooks when we get to the Catskills." Wolfkiller decided as the wagons began moving out from the campsite. "I want you to write down everything you know about breeding whatever sorts of plants and animals are still left around here. Probably, you'll write ten times more than you need to. That's fine, I'll have someone else go through it later and pick out the important parts."

The next few days went pretty much the same. The ground became drier, plants became scarcer, houses became farther apart, and eventually there were no more houses at all. Once they passed what Aster thought was a group of bandits, on donkeys. They looked as poorly fed as most of the farmers living Outside, and when they saw the large wagon train, immediately got off the trail to let them pass. They glared at the caravan, and Aster heard two of the men on donkeys get into an argument about whether or not they would have to cook the donkeys pretty soon, and if so, what they would do afterwards.

"That's bad." Wolfkiller said.

Aster looked at the scruffy bandits. "I don't think there's enough of them to attack us. What's bad?"

"That they're planning on killing the donkeys." Wolfkiller explained. "Valuable animals. I'm almost tempted to try and take them away… but I doubt these people would help me, and it would probably get some of them killed even if they would help me. Besides, there's not enough food for them where we're going, anyways. Most likely, we'd just end up eating them ourselves."

He conspicuously shifted the rifle he had on his shoulder, making sure that some of the bandits saw it, as they went past. This brought alarmed looks from the bandits, and their eyes flicked nervously at the stacks of boxes and bags in the wagons, wondering what other weapons might be hidden in or between them, to be brought out at a moments notice. After several more moments, the leader of the bandits shouted something, and they all flicked the reins on their donkeys and trotted off quickly. Probably they were worried that the more numerous and better armed people on the wagons would decide to steal their donkeys and eat them. At any rate, it didn't seem likely that they'd have to worry about the bandits trying to follow them and rob them after dark.

It was a few hours after they had scared off the donkey-mounted bandits that Aster first spotted some mountains in the distance. They camped again that night, behind a hill, though this one was bare of trees, and almost all other plant life except some tough looking tufts of grass. The following day they got up early, and soon Wolfkiller led the wagons through some deep crevasses, between rocky hills. They were going uphill, following a small stream that wound through a ditch on the right hand side of the trail. Wolfkiller said that the water was safe to drink at this point, and occasionally someone would hop off one of the wagons to fill a bottle, then hurry to catch up again.

Finally, they went around one deeply angled bend in the trail, and found themselves in a huge valley, set between mountains that looked thousands of feet high. Higher than any building in Dystopia, even the Maestro's palace. The flat valley was full of large shacks made of wood, sheet metal, and other scavenged materials. There were a number of machines sitting between the buildings, and Aster saw that some of them were actually inside the buildings. Mostly semi trucks, but there were a few smaller cars and trucks, plus some construction equipment. A few people wearing a big helmet of some sort were around one large semi truck and doing something to the engine that involved a light so bright it hurt Aster's eyes to look directly at it. She had never seen a welding torch before, but guess that was what it was, based on mentions of it in some of the books she had read. Supposedly, the light was actually dangerous to look at, and she turned her gaze away. The construction equipment was interesting, and as she watched, a man got into one of them, some machine with a small shovel on one end of it, started the engine, and drove it straight towards the mountain. She followed the machine with her eyes, and it actually went INTO the mountain. Or rather, INTO a large, obviously man-made hole that went into the side. There were several such holes, all several yards apart, set in a neat row. Each of them was far larger than the front gates of the Maestro's palace, and went back farther than Aster could see, into nearly solid darkness. They were more like mouths, than doors. Aster shuddered, almost feeling the cold air she was certain was probably breathing from those dark entrances. The sheer weight of the cold and dark seemed almost as heavy and solid as the mountains themselves, or the iron that had been wrested from it's heart over the years.

Wolfkiller brought his wagon to a halt, and let the other wagons enter the valley. The people in them gaped at the trucks and other machinery just as much as Aster had. The tall Daniel Wolfkiller let them take in the site for a few moments, then waved one arm expansively.

"Welcome to the Catskill Consolidated Iron Mines." He said with only slight irony in his voice. "Or as we like to call it, since the original owners are sadly nowhere to be found - The Underworld."

_Author's note - Anyone been reading this? Send me a PM with what you think so far, or leave a comment. I'd like to hear from some of my audience. Thanks._


	23. Chapter 23

Chapter 23. The Man Behind the Curtain

Of course, Aster could not enter the 'Consolidated Iron Mines' immediately. Horses and wagons were far less convenient than Pre-War cars. You simply couldn't park them where they sat at the end of the day. The horses had to be unhitched or de-saddled, and brought into stables to be brushed down, inspected, fed, and watered. The 'stables' in this case were located in tunnels dug into the side of the mountain. Well, hills, actually. Always curious about anything new, Aster studied them as she helped with the horses. It didn't take long for her to realize that the "Catskill Mountains" were actually very large hills, covered with dirt and trees, not real mountains made of bare rock such as she had seen in pictures. And not as tall as her first impression of them. Still, they were tall enough, and perhaps there was rock underneath. Probably there was. The iron had to come from somewhere.

She and the others had to put the horses into small paddocks inside the tunnel 'stables' that were dug into the side of the hills. The paddocks had the names of horses painted on wooden boards that hung from pegs above them, but nobody but Daniel Wolfkiller knew which horse was which, and he had to direct Aster and the people from Milwaukee as they put the horses away, then got food and water for them.

Once the horses were cared for, they had to deal with the wagons. Some of the ones with supplies, mostly the food, were driven into other tunnels. The tunnels were crude, and in some places supported with barely shaped logs rather than wooden beams. Probably they had been dug after the War. It was muddy work. The horses for the most part were too claustrophobic to cooperate with the maneuvering necessary to get the wagons into the cramped tunnels, and often they resorted to simply getting a dozen or so strong men to pull the wagons with ropes, while another 6 or so men pushed from behind. The half frozen mud was soon rutted, and covered with slushy puddles, and the tang of rust, almost like the taste of blood, was in Aster's mouth and nose as she worked.

She quickly grew frustrated that she was too weak to push the wagon as hard as a man could, and too large to effectively push from below like most of the other women were able to. A woman as abnormally tall as she was (especially for these times) could do little but get in the way. The sanguinous taste in her mouth from the rusty mud did little to improve her mood. Probably some percentage of the stuff was a slightly poisonous residue from the mines, that would take a year or ten off the lives of anyone exposed to it too often. Or would have, if the people who lived and worked after the War did not for the most part die too early from other causes to worry about the long term effects of exposure to toxins and pollutants.

Aster's boots, made from leather crudely stitched to a sole cut from an old tire, and lined with cloth, were not made for continual trudging through wetness. Water seeped through the stitches and soaked the lining. Her feet were painful with cold, and blisters rubbed by the gritty mud. She ignored it, and kept working anyways. At least as best as she could, given her combination of awkward size and lack of strength compared to a man.

They didn't both to put all the wagons in tunnels, but arranged them alongside the numerous Pre-War vehicles and pieces of construction equipment that were parked in the flat, muddy area that fronted the mines. Wolfkiller warned them not to park any wagons on the train track, though when Aster asked him why not, he merely shot her an angry look and refused to explain why. She shrugged. She was curious about what the tracks might currently be used for and annoyed that the older man wouldn't tell her. But it didn't really matter, there were plenty of other places to park the wagons. Once the wagons were arranged to his satisfaction, Wolfkiller directed them to a pile of ancient, cracked, plastic tarps that were heaped in one tunnel, and they covered the other wagons with them, to protect them and their contents from rain. Not that rain was likely. It seldom rained in Dystopia. But sometimes it did.

A few of the plastic tarps were so cracked and brittle with age, that they simply fell to shreds as they covered the wagons with them. Daniel Wolfkiller grew irate at this and told them angrily to all be 'more careful', but Aster didn't really see what could be done about it. The stuff was simply _old_. There hadn't been any plastic made since the War. Except, perhaps, in the Maestro's palace, and Aster was starting to wonder about that. Her mind, though definitely peculiar, was very good at solving certain types of problems very quickly, and she had had time, during the long wagon ride from Dystopia, to re-consider what she had been told, and believed, all her life, about high-tech goods being manufactured in the Maestro's palace. Probably _some_ of it actually was, but there were so many things that were supposedly made there, that Aster simply couldn't see where the necessary raw materials or people to make them had come from. Or how it would all fit into the Maestro's palace, even as large as it was. She had seen a few places where things were made, she had once seen a small room with tanks and glassware, where the antibiotics and drugs that Dr. Llewellyn had used in his small hospital had been made.

But many of the other things, such as the computers and cybernetic parts used to make the Wardogs? She had never seen anything that looked like a factory to make silicon chips or other electronics. Not that she knew much about how they were made, other than what she had read in old, pre-war books, but the little she had read had given her the impression that many different factories, each refining or assembling products from one or more of the previous ones, had been needed before you got a complete computer. Starting with those that mined and refined different elements from the ground. None of that existed in the Maestro's palace, that she had ever seen. Nor had she ever seen large groups of people whose jobs she didn't know. It was possible that most of the manufacturing was a huge secret, but she didn't know why, say, such things as smelting copper or weaving cloth would have been kept a secret even by someone as insane as the Maestro. And although there were some areas of the palace that had been off limits to her, she had spent enough time in the palace and become familiar enough with it to realize that these areas could not have been large enough to accommodate several different types of factories.

She had considered, and quickly rejected, the possibility that the Maestro was making all the manufactured goods himself. True, he was probably strong enough to power several factories, but creating goods took time and detailed effort. The Maestro, however strong he might have been, simply was not fast enough to create all the goods himself. Nor did he seem the type to actually do boring labor, rather than using his strength to intimidate others into doing so, and spending his own time amusing himself with whatever forms of sadism and degradation he could come up with.

Most likely, the goods she had thought were manufactured were, in fact, scavenged. Recycled, and repurposed. There had been a lot of computers before the War, and unused, and kept out of the weather, their innards probably were still in fairly decent condition. It didn't take too much of a stretch on Aster's part to imagine their chips being disassembled, and used in such things as the control modules of the Wardogs.

It had all been a big lie, Aster decided, as yet another plastic tarp shredded in her hands. Something made up by the Maestro to make himself seem more impressive to the people of Dystopia. As if his sheer strength itself was not impressive enough. But he craved respect, and pure strength simply couldn't get that for him. Especially when used the way he did. It could only get fear. But if he could represent himself as a creator, as well as a destroyer, a genius who was the last source of high tech goods, well, that impressed people and would make them feel dependent on him, since none of them were smart enough to make a computer chip themselves, under current conditions.

None of them were smart enough to make a computer chip under current conditions, because it simply wasn't possible under current conditions, Aster decided. Nobody was smart enough to do it, including the Maestro. He was a fraud. A scavenger, like the rest of them. He simply had a better supply line, and a pre-war education that let him re-use scavenged objects like computer chips for purposes different enough from their original ones that it _seemed_ new.

Aster walked absently back into the tunnel to go get another tarp. She barely looked where she was going, and hardly noticed as she tripped over a board. Pieces were clicking into place in her mind, assorted bits of information were assembling into a complete picture.

"Aw, hell no." She mumbled, drawing a look from a few of the people working with her. It was all a big fake. Worse than a fake. A fraud. The Maestro had convinced everyone they _needed_ him. That he was the only one smart enough to still create complex manufactured goods in the post war world. When it had been scavenged all along. She or anyone else could have done the same thing. It had been ordinary people like them who had made all the stuff from before the War. But they'd all been too afraid of the Maestro to think too hard about it. To afraid to look at the man behind the curtain.

The man she had seen, once, a long time ago. When a much smaller Aster had squeezed into a crack that no adult could have gotten into, and seen a tiny, old looking man who had eventually transformed before her amazed eyes from a weak looking human being into a ten foot tall green monstrosity. But the man… the man behind the curtain. Living in a green city. Like a book Aster had once read, a long time ago.

"The Wizard of Oz." She let the corner of the tarp drop, as she realized it aloud.

"Pick that up!" someone, she didn't know who, snapped at her.

"No." The person gave her a rude push that she barely noticed. There had been other Oz books. She had read all of them, at least all of them that had been in the Library, when she had been a child. Not just 'The Wizard of Oz', which most citizens of Dystopia were familiar with, as it was often shown in the single operating movie theater, but another one came to mind now. One with a faded picture on the cover of a rather regal figure, standing arrogantly in a chariot that was pulled by a lion and a tiger.

The Cowardly Lion, and the Hungry Tiger. She remembered. And an army stretched out behind the chariot. It all seemed so obvious now, but as a child, when the Maestro had first demanded that her father train two tigers from the zoo to pull him in a chariot, she hadn't made the obvious connection. It had been too ludicrous.

How could she have been expected to connect as frightening a creature as the Maestro with one as harmless as Ozma of Oz?

"Aw, hell, no." This was bad. Worse than she thought. Aster knew that her own mind was often lost in the books she had read so long ago. She didn't know if it had to be that way, if the odd child she had been would have turned out that way no matter what, or if it was her way of dealing with what she had seen and endured during her short life. But for one ordinary human woman to spend much of her life disconnected from actual reality and losing herself in books was one thing, and not much cause for alarm.

For a ten foot tall Maestro, capable of leveling buildings with few punches to be lost in old books, and no doubt experiencing the inevitable frustration when reality failed to live up to fantasy was quite another. The tigers were a good example. The cover on the book 'Ozma of Oz' had made riding in a chariot pulled by large, ferocious animals look fun, safe, and easy. It failed to show the reality of how hard it was to train and control such creatures, or the constant care they would require. Aster couldn't remember if her father had tried to warn the Maestro about what the reality of using tigers in such a manner was like. Probably he had been too frightened to warn him, and the Maestro probably would not have listened even if her father had warned him. But deliberate blindness of reality could not erase that reality, and inevitably confronted with the reality of living tigers, the Maestro had neglected them, and in the end killed one simply for following it's instincts, and left the other to starve in a cage.

She looked around for Daniel Wolfkiller, but he was nowhere to be seen. The night seemed to come earlier in the shadows cast by the Catskill Mountains, and she asked a few people where he had gone. One of them mumbled something about a 'meeting', and pointed towards the main entrance to the mines. There was a heavy wooden door with rusted iron straps, currently partly open. The door looked solid, at least six inches thick, despite the rust. The wood was covered with tar, and not rotted, and there were three sets of slots for bars on the inside. Not that that would stop the Maestro for more than a fraction of a second, but it might slow down his guards. If they hadn't brought any heavy ordinance. Which probably wasn't likely. This place survived because it was far enough away and inconveniently enough located that it hadn't been found.

The mine was in many ways, the opposite of the Maestro's palace. The hallways there had been wide and tall, built to easily accommodate someone the size of the Maestro, and lit by electricity. The rooms had been large, too. The mine on the other hand, consisted of narrow tunnels, poorly lit by a few torches and lanterns, and the ceiling was so low that Aster imagined that the Maestro would have to practically crawl to get through. Hell, Daniel Wolfkiller probably had to stoop to get through, and her own head sometimes brushed the support beams. The 'rooms', such as they were, looked to be little more than slightly wider than usual tunnels, branching out to one side or the other.

Large as it was, though, the Maestro's palace had been a prison. It was an odd thought. Aster had always thought of prison cells as being small and cramped, and freedom as existing in spacious places. But clearly, space did not make for freedom, nor did cramped quarters necessarily make a prison. She didn't have time to reflect on it further, as she heard raised voices from one small 'room' ahead of her. Aster hurried to look in, and saw Daniel Wolfkiller arguing with several other people.

Not wanting to risk the large man's bad temper, Aster wedged herself in behind the crowd and listening to what was being said. After a few minutes, she derived the gist of the argument, which was apparently that plans had been made for a few years to steal the Maestro's cruise ship 'The Green Fantasy', and sail it to Iceland, which from what the people in the room had to say, was a cross between Pre-War New York City, and Heaven itself.

Aster doubted that assessment of Iceland was anywhere near the truth. She half-listened to the crowd alternating between completely unrealistic praises of a place they knew little about, other than what they had heard in a few radio broadcasts, and screaming at Daniel Wolfkiller first for wanting to change the plans, secondly for bringing a few dozen complete strangers from The Land of The Cannibal Vampire into their oh-so-sacred mining tunnels, and thirdly, for wanting to take THEM to the Land of the Cannibal Vampire, rather than God's Own Paradise On Earth Also Known as Iceland.

Wolfkiller even had a time frame for his plan. They had to do it when the Maestro was on one of his trips to collect taxes, women, and anything else he wanted from the people who lived in and around Dystopia. The Maestro did this four times a year, in January, April, July, and October, to correspond with the four seasons. If they were going to do as he proposed, it had to be in April. April gave them over three months to train an 'army'. Daniel Wolfkiller seemed to like the word 'army' a lot, and kept using it. There were other reasons it had to be April, as well. Most of the snow would be melted on what was left of the roads between Dystopia and Milwaukee by that time, meaning they would have one less obstruction to worry about. And it would give them time to find land in Wisconsin and put in crops of some sort.

Despite the fact that Daniel Wolfkiller seemed to have everything planned well, those listening to him kept grumbling in disappointment that they could not go to Iceland. Aster thought they sounded rather like children who had not gotten the present they wanted for Christmas. In between listening to the praises and complaints of the crowd, Aster thought about the plan that Daniel Wolfkiller was trying to talk them out of, the one they had their hearts set on, that of taking the Maestro's own cruise ship to Iceland. She half-closed her eyes, envisioning a map of the world in her head, a tiny cruise ship sailing from Dystopia to a distant island nation. Tiny people dotted the map she held in her head, and she considered their most like actions. Including a tiny, infuriated Maestro. Human behavior, as a subset of animal behavior. None of the possibilities she contemplated turned out well. She shook her head, and finally spoke.

"You'll never make it to Iceland." She finally said in a clear tone, that cut through the grumbles of the crowd.

The people turned and looked at her.

"Who the hell are you?" One of them finally asked.

"Aster Aversa."

"The Zookeeping Bitch." She was apparently known, even here. At least by the snotty sounding owner of the voice. "How the hell can you know that we wouldn't make it to Iceland. You've been talking to Wolfkiller, haven't you? He told you that? Right?"

"He told me no such thing." Aster shook her head. "And I wouldn't believe it, just because he told it to me, anyways. I worked it out for myself, while you were all busy talking, just now."

"Bull shit." said a bald man with a grey moustache, wearing a patched, quilted coat that looked like it had once had a bright plaid, but now was mostly mud brown and faded grey. "How can you know all that? Or work it out in a few minutes?"

People. They thought so damned slowly, and took forever to realize the obvious. Or maybe they just didn't want to realize it. Aster explained her reasoning to them.

"The Maestro has weapons. I've seen them. Things from before the War. Missiles and stuff. He'd find the ship and blow it out of the water. Even if he doesn't have… homing beacons… or something on the ship, he had other ships with radar. The ocean is simply too empty. There's nowhere to hide between here and Iceland. And even if he didn't find us… the Icelanders would never let us land. They have radar and weapons, too. I've heard people talk about how them mention them sometimes in radio their broadcasts. They'd blow us out of the water before we got within 50 miles of the place."

"But…" the bald man seemed unplussed. "Why would they do that? They're not monsters, like the Maestro."

"If you lived in Iceland, would YOU let a boat from Dystopia land there? Knowing that the Maestro could very well be aboard?"

"But… we're not bringing the Maestro there!"

"And they're supposed to know that how, exactly? Or that we're not bringing nukes to blow them up?"

"We could talk to them on the radio. Tell them to send a small boat, inspect our ship."

"We could do that. I doubt they'd listen."

"They have to listen to reason. Surely they have to be reasonable people. Or they'd never have a civilization there."

"They are reasonable people. But they want to live. Oh, they might believe that we're innocent refugees. Probably they would believe it. But they would never let us land."

The bald man sneered. "Oh really? Why not?"

"The fact that we might be innocent, from our own point of view, doesn't mean that we aren't a threat to them." Aster explained. "If we get all the way to Iceland, they're going to assume that the Maestro probably _let_ us get away. Meaning that he's using us without our knowledge, to attack them. Possibly they may think he has nukes hidden on the boat that we don't know about. Or that he's infected us -without our knowing it - with a highly contagious and deadly, but slow acting plague of some kind. Even if they don't think we're a direct threat… letting us land there would be regarded as an act of war by the Maestro. He'd probably attack them immediately."

Aster sighed. "They are reasonable people, I'm sure. They aren't _evil_. They aren't _monsters. _But they're human, like the rest of us. They are going to try and take care of themselves, and their own families and friends first, even if it means letting innocent strangers die. Or killing them to save themselves from the Maestro. For however long they _can_ save themselves from the Maestro. I'm sure he'll get after them eventually. In ten years, or a hundred. But they want those years, for as long as they last."

The bald man looked annoyed and pulled angrily at his own grey moustache. From the looks of the hair growing there, yanking on it and actually pulling patches of it out was a frequent habit of his. Aster sighed. People generally did not react well to hard truths that took away whatever hope they had been counting on, and often blamed the person who informed them of the truths for their disappointment. Another enemy for her to deal with.

"What do we do, then? I don't like the sounds of this _Vampire_ that Wolfkiller has been talking about."

"We have a better chance with him, than with the Maestro." Aster pointed out. "For one thing, he's nowhere near as strong. Enough of us can probably fight him off, if we need to. And the people from Wisconsin have managed to survive his presence fairly well for a hundred years." The latter statement was a slight lie. During the long wagon trip, one of the things Aster had had time to think through were the things she knew about Morbius, including his dietary requirements, and the guilty, angry looks the people from Wisconsin sometimes gave her, when she mentioned the _Vampire. _Aster had run various scenarios through her head of what may have happened to the humans and the _Vampire_ living in and near Milwaukee since the war, and none of them made complete sense to her.

There was something missing… something that the people from Wisconsin probably knew, that they were not telling her. That pissed Aster off. She didn't like not knowing things that she wanted to know, and she especially didn't like people deliberately not telling her things that she wanted to know.

Well, if and when they ever got to Wisconsin, she would find out sooner or later, what the missing pieces of the puzzle were. Probably she wouldn't like it. People did not keep guilty secrets because the concealed information was rosy and fun. But whatever it was, she was fairly sure that she could not possibly _dislike_ it more than she did the Maestro. At least she hoped not.

For now, Aster dismissed the missing information, and returned to strict truth.

"It's going to be a lot easier to hide, fleeing by land than by sea." She pointed out. "Mind you, stealing the Green Fantasy is a still a good idea. In fact, we're probably going to have to, if we're to get away with this."

The bald man pulled at his moustache, this time coming away with two or three hairs. "What for? We can't take the boat to Wisconsin. The Erie locks got blown apart in the War."

Aster was about to answer when Wolfkiller interrupted.

"Smart." he said bluntly. Obviously, much as he disliked her, he could follow Aster's reasoning.

"What's smart about stealing a boat we can't use and don't need? Sounds like pointless danger to me." The bald man complained.

"Misdirection." said Aster. "We're fleeing by land, but we don't want the Maestro to know that. We steal the boat so he _thinks_ we're heading for Iceland. The boat is old… but it still works. Including the … what do you call it… autopilot, I think. And the Maestro likes to smash things. We give him something to smash, and a reason to smash it. Once he's wanked off his mad-on and thinks he's killed all of us, he'll be so pleased with himself that he probably won't bother thinking or worrying about us any more."

The bald man considered this. He reached inside his plaid quilted jacket, and fondled something Aster couldn't see. A weapon of some sort, most likely.

"What if he swims after us?" The bald man pointed out, a smug look on his face. "That bastard can hold his breath like a whale. What if he goes after us to see where we went down and look for the bodies? Wants to bring them back to stick on pikes in front of his palace. Or worse yet, wants to kill us himself, instead of letting a missile do the work. Don't think he'll be too happy with an empty boat, do you?"

Aster thought about this. "If he looks to see where the ship went down…" she bit on the inside of her lip. "The ocean is a pretty good hiding place. We can put things on the boat, to make it look like we were on it. _Some_ food and other stuff. And bodies. We can get those from the Maestro's charnel pit. Dress them up like us. After being burned when the boat is blown up, and eaten by fish, they won't be identifiable. And I think the Maestro isn't going to be surprised by not finding every last thing we steal, he'll figure it got covered by mud or drifted away in currents."

"Hmm." The balding man did not seem convinced. "And if he comes to kill us himself? Swims after us? Or takes another boat? The Green Fantasy isn't the only ship he owns. How about that, miss smartypants?"

Aster's intellect was undoubtedly more than adequate to solve this problem. But her emotional makeup was not. She could not find, could not let herself see, the obvious answer to this particular problem. Despite what she had been through in her life, what she had done, she lacked the ruthlessness needed for it.

The bald man's face puffed up so widely with smugness that Aster thought it might pop like a balloon.

"Didn't think so." He said, his face puffing up even more. "You didn't even think of that, did you? Not so smart, are you?"

Aster's mouth opened, then shut again. She felt like swearing at the rude, smug man, but that would have just made things worse. Instead, she gaped like a hooked fish.

She was rescued from her quandary by Wolfkiller.

"She didn't think of it, but I did." The man said harshly. "What you're talking about is not a problem. There's ways to deal with it."

"How?" The bald man sneered.

"How do you think?" Wolfkiller sneered back, straightening to his full height. "We put a bomb on the boat. And ask for a volunteer. Hopefully someone fairly old, or with a terminal illness."

That shut the bald man up, but Daniel Wolfkiller kept tonguelashing him. "And you're expecting a woman - a WOMAN! - who is barely more than a hurt, frightened child to think like a military commander. Just because she has the ability, doesn't mean she has the desire. Or that the rumors and graffiti about her mean that's she's some sort of hero like the dead ones on display in the Maestro's palace. And before that smug look on your face gets any bigger, you'd best consider that she managed to survive living with the Maestro for five years. Think you could do that well?"

The expression on the bald man's face turned from smugness to sourness, like a ripe apple shriveling and fermenting in the late autumn sun. He muttered something about the Maestro not being into buggery, but otherwise said nothing. His face was flushed in the torches and lanterns that illuminated the small room. Aster thought he looked like an embarrassed pig, and enjoyed a mental picture of him on a spit in front of the Maestro's fireplace, an apple stuffed in his mouth. Then she thought about the six year old boy that the Maestro had eaten, that last, terrible night, she had been there, and felt bad. How much better was she, really, than the Maestro himself, to think about such things, or wish them on someone just for being a little mean to her?

Of course, Aster didn't much like the comment that Daniel Wolfkiller had made, disparaging her because she was a 'woman'. It didn't seem fair to her, and she cursed whatever god had decided she should be born a girl. If she hadn't been a girl, the Maestro would never have been so angry at her knowing so many things. Would never have taken her away from her father to rape her. None of this would ever have happened. She would be Zookeeper now.

_The Maestro still would have gone mad, when his son died._ A mocking voice in her head pointed out. _He still would have destroyed the Zoo. You'd be NOTHING. Same as you are, now._

Even if the Maestro hadn't destroyed the Zoo, there were other problems. She had read some books about genetics in Dr. Llewellyn's office, back at the Maestro's palace, and the unpleasant nagging thought often entered her head that everything her family had done, saving the zoo animals for as long as they had, had been an exercise in futility. In fact, the lives of the human survivors in and around Dystopia, were very likely an exercise in futility.

They were all doomed. There was one way out. Maybe. But most people wouldn't like it. More likely, her thought of the intelligent descendents of bats digging up human ruins, tens of millions of years from now, was what they had to look forward to.

Aster's thoughts were interrupted by the bald man, still as red and puffed up as a pig. He pointed angrily at her. "YOU - come with me."

Aster looked at him as if he had said something utterly insane, such as proposing that castrated animals could still sire offspring. "I don't have to go with you. You're not the boss of me."

The bald man's face puffed up even larger. "The hell I'm not. I'm in charge of everything here!"

Aster glanced over at Daniel Wolfkiller. This made the bald man angry, for some reason. "What? You thought the Wolfkiller was in charge? Didn't he tell you anything?"

"I didn't have time." Daniel said. "There were other things to be done." He turned to Aster, a slightly sour look on his face. "Aster, meet General Eric Monroe. He IS in charge here. He owns the mines."

Aster thought about this. "Is he a… descendent… of the people who used to mine iron here."

The bald man curled his lip slightly.

"He found them empty. Took them over." Wolfkiller explained.

"Ah." Right of salvage was something that Aster understood. A lot of stuff from before the War was lying around, and belonged to whoever could find and hold it. "What… army… is he a General of?"

General Monroe interrupted before Wolfkiller could answer. "I'll explain that in private. Now, you come with me. NOW."

A warning flashed in Daniel's eyes, and Aster decided not to argue any more. She didn't much like this fat General, who didn't seem to be the General of any real army at all. But she wasn't sure how dangerous he was, or what sort of power he had around here. When dealing with an unknown dangerous animal, it was always safest to watch and wait. She followed the self-styled 'General' Monroe out of the small room of the mine, down a tunnel, and into an even smaller room that was too dark to see in until Wolfkiller entered with a lantern. Even with the lantern, the room was still dim. There was crude furniture in it, several round chunks of logs that were meant as stools, part of an old pre-war pallet that had been torn apart and put back together as a table, and several chests with rusty padlocks that weren't even locked.

"Thing one." General Monroe pointed at Wolfkiller. "Don't ever bring anyone here, ever again, without telling them who is in charge." He turned and pointed at Aster. "Thing two. Don't ever question or deliberately disobey me in public again."

He lowered his finger. "Feel free to question me in _private_ all you want. From what Daniel's been saying, any question you have is likely to be a good one. And what you had to say about not getting to Iceland made good sense."

"Then why did you argue with it?"

"I'm in charge here, that's why. I won't tolerate insubordination."

Aster thought it was a pretty shaky sort of 'being in charge' that couldn't stand up to being questioned at all, but said nothing. She needed this 'General Monroe' to help her, and if that meant stroking his shaky ego, so be it.

"Now… what questions do you have?"

Aster thought about this. "What army are you a general of?"

"The one I'm in the process of building. The one everyone here is going to be part of."

Aster was not at all sure if she wanted to be part of _any_ army, let alone one headed by this very unpleasant man, but let that pass. If his 'army' would help her, then she would be a part of it, if that made him happy. For now.

"If you are just making your army, right now, then how can you be a 'general'. You have to have military experience to be a 'general'? Don't you?"

"He _has_ military experience." Daniel Wolfkiller said in a slightly sour tone. "He used to be a bandit."

"That's military experience?"

"I was a _successful_ bandit." The self-styled 'general' pointed out. "Unlike the ones that the Wolfkiller here said that you met on the way here."

A thief and a murderer then, Aster decided. Who apparently was smart enough to realize he was getting too old for the thief and murder business. But pretty much all governments throughout history were self-legalized thieves and murderers.

General Monroe noticed Aster thinking, remained silent for a few moments, then went on. "Here's a little test for you. Unlike the bandits that you and Wolfkiller saw on the way here, I was never caught and hung. In fact, you would never have even _seen _me or my men, unless I decided to rob you. Which I would never have tried against a group as large as yours. So you tell me… what would you have seen?"

Aster's eyes closed slightly, envisioning different sized caravans of travellers, and a group of bandits led by a younger General Erick Monroe.

"I don't think I would have seen you and your whole group of bandits." Aster said thoughtfully. "You wouldn't have had supply wagons with you, not to rob people, they'd slow you down. You'd take _their _wagons if you needed them. Without wagons, and with a whole group of men, it would have been obvious that you _were_ bandits, and people would have reported you to the Maestro. So you must have had scouts. Maybe a few people disguised as travellers or beggars. Maybe even a small, weak looking group of bandits, that people wouldn't bother worrying about or reporting. Or you might have paid people who lived near the road to tell you about small groups of travellers that were safe to rob."

_And kill. _Aster didn't add that, but it was fairly obvious to her by the fact that General Monroe had said he was a _successful _bandit. Successful bandits did not leave witnesses. She resolved to be very, very careful around this bandit chieftan. He was a killer, and while not stronger than the Maestro, was still stronger than her.

"Hmm." General Monroe nodded. "You figured out most of my methods. Not all, but most. And a lot faster than it took me."

He strode over to the chests, and took out a wooden board, and a box of chess and checker pieces. "I want to try something with you. Play a couple games of this with me. Let's see how you are at strategy."

Aster loved both chess and checkers. Her eyes lit up as she regarded the nicely carved wooden pieces. The black and white checkers had ornate geometrical carvings on top, and the chess set looked like tiny little people. There were tiny carved, cute, child-like faces on the pawns and regal faces on the other pieces. General Monroe set up the checker game first, and Aster beat him three times in a row. She could simply see too many moves ahead in the game, compared to what the older man could. After the third game, the 'General' grew visibly annoyed, and set up some chess pieces instead. At this game, Aster lost. Badly. And fairly quickly.

After he second game, General Monroe stood up, apparently having proven something to himself. He looked down at Aster. "Do you know why you will never be a military leader?"

The question had little meaning for Aster. She had no more desire or ability to be a 'military leader' than she had to dig a hole in the ground like a mole. She shook her head.

"Neither do I." General Monroe put the two games away. "In the sense that I don't know what sort of joke which god might have had in mind, when he made you, then broke you. But you'll never be a military leader. Oh, you've the mind for strategy. Better than mine. But you're a _woman._ And you've too much compassion. Especially for a world like this one. You're afraid to sacrifice pieces. At least the ones that seem like people to you. As for sacrificing actual people… soldiers in a war… you'd kill to defend yourself… you'd even sacrifice yourself for others… but you'd never give the orders to send others to their death, would you?"

"I don't like killing people." Aster didn't know why she felt guilty. "I was supposed to be a Zookeeper. Keep animals alive. Not go around killing."

"In war" General Monroe said in a cold voice. "Sometimes you have to sacrifice some people to keep the rest alive. But that's not your job. You've in the army now. You've a brilliant mind for strategy. I intend to use it. You'll train. You'll answer my questions, to the best of your ability. You'll ask questions… in private. You might even give orders. But not about people. That's _my _job."

Aster thought about this. She really didn't care if she 'gave orders' or not. She had no desire to be a tyrant like the Maestro, or this General Monroe. Truth be told, she really wasn't interested enough in most people to care what they did, unless they worked for her, in which case the only thing she cared about was whether they did their jobs. "Why are you building an army, to escape from here? It seems hard. Why not just live off what you stole as a bandit?"

"Ah. A good question." General Monroe smiled slightly for the first time. "It's about a woman. Or several. It always is." He glanced over at Daniel Wolfkiller, for some reason. "For a long time I didn't think I cared about them. Or the 'presents' I gave some of them. But as I've gotten older… I've started to care a little. I don't have a 'God'. Or much longer to live. All the money I've stolen won't buy me five more years of life. So if I can use what I've gotten, and what I've learned to get them to a better place than this, away from that Green bastard, maybe things won't have been a complete waste."

_He's dying._ Aster realized. Probably cancer. The mines were free of radiation, but the life of a bandit, cutting through the wastelands repeatedly, had caught up with the former bandit in the end. This was his particular way of putting his affairs in order.

"So… will you help me? Follow my orders?" General Monroe asked. "So we can get the hell out of this Hell?"

Aster nodded and held out her hand. She was in the army now.


	24. Chapter 24

Chapter 24. The Army of Darkness

_ "If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves." - Winston Churchill_

Joining the Army, Aster decided, had been a mistake.

Not that she decided it immediately. First, General Erick Monroe had had questions for her. Any information she had about the Maestro, his palace, his guards, his weapons, whatever procedures they had. He was a skilled interrogator, and Aster found that she knew things that she didn't even know she had known about the Maestro. She shuddered to think what sort of methods 'General' Monroe might have used on someone unwilling to give him the information he wanted.

It seemed that Aster had a better memory for detail than most people, because about five minutes into the questioning, General Monroe shook his head and turned to Wolfkiller. "You were right about one thing. She's a bloody walking encyclopedia. I don't understand half of what she's saying and can't remember a tenth of it. A lot of it isn't even relevant, but I haven't go the time to explain to her why, and from what you say, she probably _can't _understand why, and I don't dare miss anything that _is _important. Get Trask and Lucy. Tell them to bring a LOT of paper and pencils."

Aster did not much like hearing that things she said were not 'relevant'. Really, who was this 'General', that he thought he knew what was relevant or not? It seemed important to Aster that the Maestro was living out bits and pieces of the old Wizard of Oz stories, but the man in front of her dismissed it as 'fairytale nonsense'. He didn't even seem to understand what intestinal bacteria were, or why it was important that the Maestro, so far as Aster could tell, had the same sort as everyone else. But then she thought about the sort of methods that 'General' Monroe might be likely to use if he didn't like her answers or even just didn't like her face, and resolved not to argue the point with him. She remembered being frightened of Daniel Wolfkiller in much the same way, when she had been younger. Eventually she had gotten over that. But perhaps she shouldn't have. After all, Wolfkiller did work for Monroe, who was certainly a bandit and murderer, and probably worse.

She shifted uncomfortably. The chair she sat in was too low, made of hard, knotty wood, and didn't seem proportioned right. That, although Aster didn't realize it, was deliberate, and designed to encourage rapid telling of the truth. Or it should have been. Aster's version of 'truth' was far too complex and detailed to convey at all quickly, and General Monroe was regettting having put the girl in the chair. But he couldn't at this point offer her a different seat without showing weakness.

Aster frowned and reached a hand under her leg to rub the sore spots. General Monroe had asked her a lot of questions about what she thought was going on in Wisconsin, and why there was no radiation and lots of plants there, and what the 'genetically engineered sunflowers' (General Monroe pronounced this with a combination of caution and disdain) _Helianthus Morbiusii _had to do with fixing the damage and radiation caused by the War. He seemed to like (judging from his excitement) what Aster said about how many plants Betty … Patricia Miller had said grew there, and how much food and how many people lived in and near Milwaukee but did not seem to like at all what Aster had said about the _Vampire, _Morbius. He didn't care that Morbius had been the one who made (or at least helped to make) the sunflowers that somehow got rid of the radiation in Milwaukee. Since the radiation was gone, and there was plenty of food, it would make a nice place to live, but General Monroe was not inclined to show much gratitude to such a dangerous creature. The only possible use he saw to keeping the _Vampire_ alive at all is that Aster convinced him that Morbius might know of some way to kill the Maestro. It made a certain amount of sense to use the _Vampire _for that. Then kill him afterwards.

"He drinks human blood and kills people." The man growled. "A cannibal, like the Maestro. I've talked to the people from Wisconsin about him already. He's been killing for a hundred years. There's no way to keep him around safely."

Aster disagreed, trying to explain that the _Vampire_ had not chosen his condition and diet the way the Maestro had, and finally General Monroe shook his head in disgust at her stubbornness. "Well, if you get to Wisconsin - and that's a pretty big 'if' - go ahead and try what you want with him. I won't be around to stop you, anyways. I'll even tell Wolfkiller to help you. But once you fail… and you will fail… you won't be able to stop Wolfkiller and the rest of the army from dealing with this _Vampire_ of yours. And with you as well, if you're fool enough to get in their way."

"I don't think I'll fail." Aster said. She remembered enough of what she had read about the _Vampire_ to be certain her plan was a good one. "But… since you think I'll fail, do me a favor. Tell the people from Milwaukee that you think I'll fail."

"Since I _know_ you're going to fail, that's not really a problem. But… why do you want them to think you're going to fail, if you think you're going to succeed."

Aster frowned, not sure how to explain her thoughts. "There's something I don't trust about the people from Milwaukee. Something about the _Vampire_. I talked about him a few times to them on the trip here, and there's something not right about the way they look when they're talking about him. They act like they're ashamed of something about him. I don't understand what… but it's something… it's like if you have a dog, and you come into the house, and your dog looks ashamed. You know that your dog has done something wrong, but you don't know what. And I don't know what, and I don't like it, because it honestly doesn't make any sense to me. The _Vampire _is the one that's been killing people. So why should _they _be ashamed. I've thought it over and over in my head, and I can't work it out. And I don't like it, and I don't trust them. So I want them to think that I'll fail, because people don't feel guilty because everything is roses and peaches. They feel guilty because something bad is going on, and if they think I'll succeed in controlling the _Vampire_, they'll probably worry that I'll find out whatever it is they're ashamed of, and do something to prevent me from finding out."

"Hmm." General Monroe had noticed the same oddness when he had talked to the people from Milwaukee about the _Vampire_, but had attributed it to fear. It was because of the fear that he assumed they felt, that he assumed Aster would fail. But now that he thought about it, what had been on their faces had seemed more like guilt then fear. Or guilt mixed with the fear. And as Aster said, that didn't make any sense. "You may be right. And perhaps you will succeed. I didn't want you to before, but now I do. I was going to tell Wolfkiller just to keep you alive, if he could, probably by keeping you the hell away from this _Vampire, _but now I'm going to have to tell him to actually help you catch this bastard _Vampire _of yours, blast it to hell. Because you're right about the guilt. And whatever it is they feel guilty about… I won't be around to worry about it, but you and everyone else will be best off finding out about it sooner, rather than later."

Aster was about to ask what General Monroe meant by 'not being around' ,as he had used that phrase twice, when the two people he had sent for, 'Trask' and 'Lucy' came into the rocky chamber. The former was a man with receding, greasy black hair, and the latter an old woman with grey hair in a ponytail that nearly reached her waist. Trask was an artist, and Lucy knew something she proudly claimed was 'Pitman Shorthand'. Aster wasn't entirely sure what 'Pitman Shorthand' was. It seemed to be a secret language made of funny looking squiggles that could be written very quickly, and as Aster talked, Lucy made notes in it. Aster was impressed that anyone could write so much, so quickly, and resolved to learn more about 'Pitman Shorthand'. Someday. If she had time.

Trask's job was to draw pictures and maps of anything General Monroe asked Aster about, including the palace, the cruise ship 'The Green Fantasy', and drawings of the Maestro as he had looked in his human form. The latter was especially interesting to General Monroe, who kept asking Aster about it. "You say you saw him change back? Into a man?"

"He already _was_ a man. When I saw him" Aster explained for the third time, getting annoyed. General Monroe seemed to have things backwards. She didn't realize that asking the same thing repeatedly and looking for contradictions in a statement was one way in which skilled interrogators discerned lies. "He was typing on a _computer_. From before the war. If he had been… well the way he usually is, just touching it would have broken it to bits, most likely. I didn't even know who he was at first. Just some ugly old man. Then when he was done typing, he changed back."

"I could do with a _computer_ to type on." Lucy remarked. She looked down at calloused, slightly gnarled fingers, then made some more of her squiggles in the 'Pitman Shorthand'. General Monroe gave her a withering look and turned back to Aster.

"He changed back… how? Did he drink something? Give himself an injection? Attach himself to a machine?"

"No. No potion. Not like in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." The first time Aster had mentioned Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, General Monroe had gotten excited and seemed to think that she was referring to people who had worked for the Maestro, until Aster explained that it had been a book she had once read, at which point he had dismissed the matter with a wave. That life often imitated fiction was inevitable, given the sheer number of books that had been written before the War. "He just … did it. He took off his robe first, it wouldn't have fit him once he got larger. I don't know how."

"Apparently he can will the change then. Well, that's just fucking lovely." From the sound of his voice, General Monroe found the matter to be about as far from 'lovely' as was possible. He had Trask draw a picture of the old man, from Aster's description, and after a lot of erasing and redrawing of certain features, Trask had a fairly good likeness of him.

"So that's Dr. Bruce Banner. The man who made the bomb. Looks like a damn fucking pussy." General Monroe muttered. He turned to Daniel Wolfkiller. "Look familiar to you?"

"I've never seen him like that." The younger man shook his head. "I doubt he wants anyone to know that it's possible. Aster was… small at the time. Otherwise she would never have fit into the space where she was."

"Nice to know he's human enough to make mistakes."

Aster looked at the picture. "Can I have a copy of that?"

Monroe was always suspicious. "What for?"

"If I ever see him again… and he's like that… I don't want to forget what he looks like. I know he's weaker when he's like that, because he didn't break the _computer _he was typing on. So I think maybe he can be killed when he's like that. He wouldn't have locked himself away the way he did, for no reason. I wouldn't want to miss the chance."

General Monroe tapped his finger, thinking. It was doubtful that Aster was a traitor. She had more reason than most to hate the Maestro. But she was poor at keeping secrets, and it was more than likely that a traitor might go through her belongings. And there was _always_ a traitor. "You can have your copy, but not now. Once we leave, then you can have it."

Aster shrugged. She wouldn't need the picture immediately anyways. She had no idea what General Monroe was afraid of. But it didn't matter. So long as she got what she wanted in the end.

Then there were more questions. General Monroe kept coming back to the Maestro's seasonal trips, during which he collected taxes, food, women, and anything else he wanted from the people who lived in and around Dystopia. He kept asking Aster if she was sure that he always collected taxes at the same time.

"Four times a year. At the start of the seasons." She told him for what seemed like the twentieth time. "At the beginning of January, April, July, and October." She frowned a bit. "I remember because that's always when I changed the straw in my mattress, back home."

"Screw your bloody mattress." General Monroe pounded his fist angrily on the table. He had often wished for more information from stupid or stubborn witnesses. Now he wished for less. "The only thing I care about is that he's a creature of habit. He's gone mad, so that might change. I hope to God it doesn't."

He glanced at Wolfkiller. "It'll have to be April, then. If he keeps to his old schedule."

Daniel Wolfkiller shrugged. "And if he doesn't?"

"If he doesn't, we're dead. So it doesn't really matter, now does it? We might as well plan for his keeping to his schedule."

Aster understood why the attack on the Maestro's palace, to steal food and other supplies had to be in April. Early spring was the only time they had any chance of escape. Most of the snow would be off the roads, and once they got to Wisconsin, they would have time to plant food, for the next year.

General Monroe got up, dusted off his hands, and pointed nastily at her. "YOU - keep your mouth shut! Wolfkiller says you're not very good at that. Well, you can bloody well learn. You talk to no-one here, except me and whoever I say you can, about the Maestro, the palace, or anything having to do with them. If you don't know if you should talk about something, then don't talk about it. If you don't keep your mouth shut, I'll give you an extra mouth across your throat. If someone bothers you about it, you tell me, and I might give THEM an extra mouth. Do I make myself clear?"

Aster nodded her head rapidly, afraid to say anything.

"Quiet already." The self-styled 'general' nodded approvingly. "Good. A second thing. Through a combination of luck, brains, and coincidence, you've managed to get a certain amount of power. Of people who look up to you. Wolfkiller tells me there's bloody graffitti about you back in Dystopia. Some of it actually from the Bible. Under normal circumstances, that could be useful. I'd give you a rank in my army, woman or not, to let you use it, because that would be useful to _me. _The problem is that there's something wrong with the way you think. You don't want power, and you don't seem to be able to use it when you have it. I don't know what's wrong with you, or how to fix it. As it is, power is about as useful to you as a lantern is to a blind man. It can only burn you. The only way for it to be of any use to you is to give it to someone who CAN use it. If you want to stay alive, I'd suggest you find a way give it to me. Do what I tell you, recognize me as your commanding officer in public, regardless of what you think privately in that twisted up brain of yours, and I can use what you give me to keep you alive. To get even with the bastards who hurt you and killed your family. Do you want that, or do you want to hold onto something that's no good to you just to piss me off?"

"I don't like you, but I hate the Maestro more than anyone. Paul Rasse, too." Aster added the sadistic, raping guard as an afterthought. "If 'recognizing you as my commanding officer' in front of other people keeps me alive and gets even with them, then I'll do it. It doesn't really make any difference to me one way or the other. So I'll do it."

"For now…" General Monroe added in a mocking tone, divining what was in Aster's mind. "I'm sure you're thinking that. Don't deny it, I don't give a fuck. 'Later' doesn't really matter to me. Now, get out of here. Lucy will show you where you can sleep. I suggest you try to sleep. You're going to need it."

The last bit, about 'going to need' sleep, sounded rather ominous to Aster, but she was afraid to ask what General Monroe meant by it. She just nodded obediently, and followed Lucy to a large chamber in the mine full of several dozen people sleeping on 'beds' made of piles of old sacks filled with rags and straw. They smelt bad, as if the rags were dirty and the straw had not been changed in a long time, but Aster was too afraid of General Monroe to complain. The fear was deliberate, and there would be many other unpleasant things in the near future that were deliberate, but for the present moment, Aster made her way to some unoccupied sacks, smoothed them out the best she could, and went to sleep.

It was the last decent sleep she got in a long time, and it was far earlier than she would have liked, when she (and everyone else in the room) were woken up by the sound of General Monroe beating on a pot with a large spoon that looked old and well made enough to be a pre-war artifact.

"UP! You stupid maggots! UP!" Barely a second went by, when he began screaming in an angry voice. "You all sleep like corpses! I could have killed six of you before you got to your feet! UP! I say!"

Aster got up, and was about to ask where breakfast was, when a boy, who looked to be barely twelve years old, asked that very question. General Monroe seemed furious at him.

"YOU will get no breakfast today!" He told the boy. "As for the rest of you, you will get breakfast when I say you get breakfast. Or perhaps you won't get any, either. We'll see how well you do! UP, I say!"

Aster was looking around for her boots, as were a few other people, which seemed to further infuriate General Monroe. "Did I say to look for your boots! You're all wasting time! OUT! OUT! OUT!"

He kicked several of the nearest people in she shins, and Aster was glad that she was against the far wall, out of his reach. Then he made them all run out of the sleeping area, down several tunnels, and out of the mines.

The sun was not even up, and Aster could barely see by the light of the setting moon.

"Start running!" the general ordered. Nobody was sure what this meant, some of them looked around in confusion, some of them began jogging in place, a few began running down road the wagons had come in by.

_**BANG!**_

The sudden noise of the gun 'General Monroe' had unexpectedly drawn out and shot into the air immediately transformed the confusion of the mob into cold fear. Not just of his shooting them for their failure to divine exactly _how_ he wanted them to run, but even though Aster knew intellectually that no-one lived within miles of the mines, she could not help immediately thinking in her gut: _What if someone heard?! What if they tell the Maestro?!_

From the looks on the faces of most of the others, the same thought had occurred to them. Obviously, it wouldn't do to displease the 'General' of this 'Army' they were now in. Not if he was so mad that he would risk the Maestro hearing, in order to get their attention

"No, no, no!" General Monroe screamed angrily, putting the gun back inside his worn coat "Where do you fools think you're going? Nowhere, or back to Dystopia?! Morons! Follow me! Like this!"

He began leading them in circles, around the large flat area in front of the mines. Most of the people seemed confused, and tripped and stumbled, drawing further screaming from the 'General' but Aster saw that the trucks and other vehicles were parked in a rough circle, and their shapes provided a rough guide as to where to run.

It was unpleasant, though. Aster was running through slushy mud puddles with only socks to protect her feet, and after three steps, they were soaked through. Her feet hurt, the icy water cut like shards of glass, and her side hurt from the running, and she couldn't help sniffing in misery as she ran. General Monroe heard this, but she got no sympathy from him. Quite the opposite.

"Oh, do you hurt, princess?" He sneered. "Are you cold? Maybe I'll send you back to the Maestro to be raped, or roasted on a spit. Would you like that better? At least you'd be warm"

"Fuck you." Aster hissed.

"An interesting offer." General Monroe actually seemed to consider it. "But I prefer women who are a normal size and don't talk my head off. So I'm afraid you don't get out of running, that way."

He turned away from her, and began screaming at a group of men. "What are you doing, tripping like that! Princess here seems to be able to keep on her feet! What are you, a bunch of little girls?"

As she went through the shadow of one of the trucks, Aster paused long enough to pull her socks off. They weren't protecting her feet. Quite the opposite, they soaked up icy, gritty mud. At least without them, her feet got slightly warmer between mud puddles, and she could feel better with her toes where she was going. She didn't want to lose her socks, so stuck them in the pockets of her pants. Then she began running again, hoping General Monroe had not seen her pausing. As a matter of fact, he had, but he said nothing. Adapting to unpleasant conditions and cheating was something he wanted in his army, and which couldn't be overtly taught.

A girl, who looked about 14, tripped and split her lip. She got no sympathy from General Monroe, and had to keep running with a bloody face. "I want to stop." She sobbed.

"You'll stop when you're dead. And you ain't dead yet, and a cut like that won't kill you. Though I might, if you don't start moving."

The girl was more afraid of General Monroe than the pain and blood. She wiped her mouth with her shirt, leaving a blackish streak in the darkness, and kept running.

After about ten minutes, some of the older and younger people in the 'Army' literally couldn't run any more. General Monroe finally let them stop.

For five minutes.

It was when he forced them to start running again, that Aster decided that joining the Army had definitely been a mistake. She wished she were back home, young again, before the Maestro had taken her away, and helping her father care for the animals, or eating a crispy baked potato, or telling a story to Thumb.

But there was no home. No father. No Thumb. The Maestro had taken it all away from her. She thought about his horrible ugly face, his filthy, ugly green cock that he had nearly raped her to death with, and ran a little faster. She wished she could run across the Maestro's dead body and trample it into the cold, rust stinking mud.

She thought maybe when her feet got cold enough, they would stop hurting, but it didn't seem to be cold enough for _that._ It just hurt worse and worse. Aster was reminded of a story she had read, _The Little Mermaid, _who had fallen in love with the prince, and was given legs and feet instead of a fish tail, in order to be with him. Except every step she took on land hurt her feet, as badly as Aster's hurt now. She didn't get the prince in the end, either, Aster remembered. No more than Aster would get hers. The Maestro had nearly raped her to death, and ripped her up so badly inside that any attempt at sex would hurt her, and giving birth would kill her, according to Doctor Llewellyn. Aster had tested that a few times, putting a few fingers inside herself, but anything much thicker than one finger or a scrap of rag she used during her period caused her pain.

No, the only difference between her and the mermaid in the story was that the mermaid had lost her voice as well. Aster could still scream, and was doing so as she ran, though she couldn't even hear herself amidst the screaming and cursing of everyone else around her.

Eventually, 'General' Monroe seemed to be satisfied with the amount of running they had done. Or perhaps 'satisfied' was not the correct word, since he still seemed very angry, as if either the amount or quality of the running they had done was not nearly up to his expectations. The sun was up now, just peeking over the tops of the hills to their east. He looked them over, glaring angrily.

"You lot are a lousy, disorganized rabble!" He snarled in a voice that sounded like an dog about to attack. "You men are as weak as women. As for you women… you might as well be suckling babes."

One of the women spoke up at this. "It isn't fair for you to force my son to be here. He's just a boy. He's only 14!"

"Only 14?!" The general spoke in a falsetto tone. He looked around for a moment, then pointed a finger straight at Aster. "You! Zookeeping Princess. Get up here!"

Aster was too afraid that General Monroe might shoot his gun off again, and possibly be _heard_ this time, not to obey. She hunched over slightly, wishing that she weren't so easy to pick out of the crowd of malnourished people where even the men were mostly shorter than her.

General Monroe pointed at her. "Princess, how old were you when you got raped by the Maestro for the first time?"

Aster gaped. This was not a question she expected, and she really didn't like thinking about it, much less talking about it in public. Her failure to answer immediately seemed to further infuriate General Monroe. He raised one hand, and Aster was sure he intended to slap her or punch her in the face, but at the last minute he seemed to restrain himself and and instead took her by the shoulder and shook her.

"Am I your commanding officer?"

Aster remembered what he had said last night, about giving him the power she couldn't use herself. She nodded, then spoke. "Yes."

"Yes, what?"

"Yes…" For a moment Aster was going to add 'My Lord', as that was the term of respect she had been taught to address the Maestro by, but it didn't seem wise to make General Monroe seem too much like the Maestro in front of people who hated the green monstrosity. Aster thought about a few army stories she had read, and said instead: "Yes, sir!"

"Good. Then answer me. How old?!" He demanded.

"F…f… fourteen." Tears trickled down her face.

"Fourteen." This seemed to prove something to the 'General', though Aster had no idea what. Rather than let her leave her humiliation, though, the General asked her another question. "Why don't you tell me what you told me last night? What the Maestro was doing, the night before he threw you out of his palace?"

"What he was doing?" The Maestro had done a lot of horrible things, those last few, awful months, and Aster didn't like to think about any of them. She wished she weren't here, having to think and talk about them. She wished she were curled up in a warm bed, and could think about eating a warm piece of pie, or about her old books of stories she had once read.

There was no such escape. "What he was _eating_!" General Monroe specified.

"He… he had a boy. A little boy, maybe six years old. On a spit like a pig or goat. He was eating the boy." Aster closed her eyes, wishing away the image of what she had seen, the saliva that had been trickling down the Maestro's green face and into his greasy, grey beard as he ate. Human beings had a lot of fat, just like pigs. The bit of anatomical knowledge was unwanted, and Aster wished she hadn't thought of it. Or didn't know it. She talked, to distract herself from the memory. "He ate him. Because his father didn't have any meat to give the Maestro. So he took the boy and ate him instead."

The people around them gasped. Aster was sure that it must be common knowledge by now that the Maestro was a cannibal, but to _know_ something was one thing. To actually hear it said was quite another. It made it harder to pretend it wasn't going on.

"Well, there you have it." General Monroe looked over the group of people as though they were some sort of worthless ants he had found under a log, then focused his gaze on the woman who had complained about her son being in the army. "You don't like your son in my army, we can always send the both of you back. What do you think, at his age, will that green bastard eat him or bugger him?"

The 'General actually appeared to be mulling the matter over. "I'd have to say, the Maestro'd probably have him on a spit, just because he's not really that into buggery. He prefers women… or girls." He pointed at Aster. "I'm sure some of you saw the Zookeeper here when she was being dragged off in a cage. She was 14 then, but the way I hear it, she looked more like ten. Not a hair on her, and believe it or not, actually short for her age, back then."

The 'General' let the crowd look Aster over for a moment, then pointed her back into the crowd, leaving him alone in front of everyone, before he began pacing. "I'm not an angel, and don't pretend to be. You all know what I am. I don't apologize for it. You don't like it, leave. But before you do, you just think about your children or grandchildren - or those of your relatives or neighbors if you don't have any, in the hands of that green bastard. Because's he's worse than I am. Even if he doesn't kill them or rape them to death, the way things are going, he's eating his way through every bit of food he can get his hands on, and leaving the people who grew it to starve on crumbs!"

The group before him seemed angry at this. They probably wanted baked potatoes, pies, and other decent food as badly as Aster did, and none of them had even had any breakfast at all that day.

"That bastard has taken everything from us!" Everyone nodded in agreement. "He built the bomb and took the world that used to exist - you've all seen it in pictures and heard stories about that! Then that wasn't enough for him - oh no! He's been taking our food! Our children! Our lives! Hell, as if even that weren't enough, the Zookeeper here says he took the last zoo animals, not that I care about that, but they were helpless animals and some of them may have been the last of their kind. And it's a piece of our world gone that our children will never have. HE took all that! So I say - we take it back from him! We can't fight him, but we can escape from him! We have a place to go! A land with food! With no radiation! The zookeeper - the only bitch the Maestro ever kneeled to - told me about it. And there's people who have come from there. It's not a perfect place - there is no perfect place, and there's a monster - a _Vampire _\- there, but he's nowhere near as bad as the Maestro. He may even know how to kill the Maestro! It's worth finding out! And if the _Vampire_ gives us any trouble, or doesn't do what we want, well, he's nowhere near as strong as the Maestro. If we don't like him, we'll just toss him in a hole and dump stones on him and piss on the top! I say - we take back what we need from that Green Bastard to make it there!"

The crowd roared in approval at that.

"Here's a start of what we took from him, a caravan full of tribute he'll never get, the greedy bastard!" The 'General' strode over to a sack that was sitting partly hidden by a heap of scrap a few feet away from him, opened it, and pulled out a loaf of slightly moldy bread. "Food for US now - not HIM or HIS army. For OUR ARMY!"

He threw the loaf into the crowd, and it was quickly seized and devoured by the lucky few people nearest to where it landed. Before the disappointment of the others could turn into anger, General Monroe threw several more loaves in, until the strongest and fastest of his army had had enough to eat that they grew generous enough to share with others. Unlike with the wagons, Aster's peculiar proportions were an advantage, her arms were as long as a man's, but thinner, and could reach past others to grab a handful of muddy bread to stuff into her mouth. The muddy, moldy stuff tasted better than crispy baked potatoes with butter and sour cream and chives. Better than a hot pie with sugar crumbling around the edges.

"I'm not a good man." General Monroe told them once the food was gone. "There are no good men in times like these. It's bad men that survive. But if you're going to take back from that bastard what he took from us, you need someone like me to lead you. Someone to teach you to be as tough and ruthless as him and HIS army. Someone to give OUR ARMY every advantage!"

There was nodding. Invading the Maestro's palace to steal back what they needed would be hard. They needed to be hard and trained to do it.

"Every time you think that what I do hurts you - that the cold and mud and stones hurt - think of what the Maestro has done to you! Think of what he WILL do to you - and your children if you fail! You all know he's been burning people alive! You'd all be better off dead right now than so weak that you let him catch you alive!"

"So, we need every advantage we can get for our army. I heard some of you complaining about running in the dark - what are you complaining about? The dark isn't alive! It can't hurt you! Only the enemy can hurt you! So - you can't see. Poor you. So what? There's nothing there in the dark that isn't there in the light! Learn to get around in the dark! The Maestro - strong as he is - can't see in the dark! If he can't see you - he can't catch you! If he can't catch you - he can't hurt you! And his guards - they are all afraid of the dark, too. They all have lights. Well - lights can be put out! The hell with the light! The bloody bomb that blew up the world - that was one big bloody light. The fire he's burning people in is one big light! The old heroes - the ones who tried to kill the Maestro and failed and died- they were all heroes of the light. The only one that lived - the _Vampire_ I told you about- was a creature of darkness. Well - we don't need it! Not any of it! We don't need the light, or the bomb, or the green bastard burning people in the fire! Not this army! We're going to survive like the _Vampire_! We're here to destroy all their lights! We'll fight in the dark, because that's what we do - what we are. The Army of Darkness!"


	25. Chapter 25

Chapter 25. The Seed Corn

Training in the Army of Darkness was work, work, work.

Aster remembered many years ago, caring for the animals in the Zoo has also been work, especially for a small-for-her-age little girl. There had been water and food to bring to the animals, shit to take away, females to be bred, and hard decisions to make about which animals to keep and which to be culled, either to leave enough food and room for the rest, or (more often) to provide something for the Maestro's insatiable appetite.

It had been pointless, Aster had come to realize. There weren't enough animals in the Zoo to avoid inevitable inbreeding and extinction, no matter how many charts her father kept. Still, it had kept her family alive and fairly well off (as the Maestro often wanted exotic creatures for his table) and the little girl she had been had found it fun. And perhaps a few of the smaller animals, some of the small snakes or bats that had escaped or been released by her father, before the Maestro had been destroyed, might breed their numbers back up fast enough to make it.

There were worse legacies to a life than to leaving a population of bats behind in Dystopia. And like the chores in the Zoo, the thought of frantic bats flying into the Maestro's long, dirty hair or biting and scratching him in the dark when he couldn't see them (not that the tiny creatures could actually hurt the green bastard) was fun.

Fun, fun, fun. Not work, work, work, like training in General Monroe's army. The Army of Darkness. Aster liked the name. It was like something from a storybook, and Aster wondered how General Monroe had come up with it. And it seemed her stories were not quite as 'irrelevant' as General Monroe had original said. Because after she had been in the Army a few days, he actually had her come up before everyone else, and tell them about the story she had read 'Ozma of Oz', and how Ozma had had a chariot pulled by the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger, and how the Maestro had done exactly the same thing. He even got his pet sketch artist, Trask, to draw pictures of Ozma and her chariot, from Aster's description of the cover of the book.

"Let them see how that Green Bastard is acting like a vain little girl." General Monroe said, glancing at Aster, then turning away. "It'll give them courage, and they need every bit they can get."

He also had Aster talk about how Ozma had a magic carpet, that let her and the Army of Oz cross the deadly desert, that killed anything that touched it.

"We'll cross the wastelands." General Monroe assured everyone. "We don't have a magic carpet, but we have the trucks, and plenty of metal to keep out the radiation. Especially from our _Seed Corn_."

The _'Seed Corn' _was something General Monroe talked about often. It referred to anyone under age 30, _especially_ (as in ONLY) women and girls. Aster understood. Women were born with all the eggs they would ever have, and if they were damaged by radiation, they would have mutated children. Or no children. Men were always making sperm. If some were damaged… well, there would be new sperm in a few weeks. And one of general Monroe's laws was NO SEX. Now, or until a month after they got to Wisconsin. Radiation could harm an embryo as well. They weren't sure how old an embryo or fetus had to be before radiation would no longer cause mutation, and decided that the less risk, the better. And they were the Army of Darkness. _Seeds_ grew in the darkness, not in the light, and radiation was a form of light, Aster assured everyone. Or at least energy. She had read it in books. It was just a sort of light that your eyes couldn't see, but it was still there. And everyone hated radiation. Not only had the War made a dangerous amount of it, almost everywhere, but it had been radiation that created the Maestro himself. The darkness was far better.

"Bugger your wife. Or another man. Or have her suck you off. Or wank off. I don't fucking well care. But I'll hang the man who gets a woman knocked up before we get through the radiation."

Aster laughed a little at this, but was careful to hide it. She had read a few stories about armies, back when she had been little, and this was probably the first, last, and only army she had ever heard of where homosexuality had actually been actively encouraged. A pity the Maestro hadn't been gay, then he would have left her alone, and none of the horrible things that had happened, would have happened.

No… she shook her head. They just would have happened to someone else. A boy, somewhere, instead of her. And probably the zoo would be gone anyways, and she wouldn't know the things about the Maestro and the Palace that she did, that made her so useful to General Monroe. _Nobody is ever told what __would__ have happened. _That was a line from a book, too. About a magical land called Narnia, that had talking animals just like the Oz books. She had no way of knowing what _would_ have happened if the Maestro hadn't taken her as a slave. It could be that her father and sister would still be alive and the Zoo would still be there. Or it could be that it all would be dead and gone as it was now, and she would be dead as well.

General Monroe's threat to hang someone was not mere talk. He hung a man three days after Aster had joined the Army. It happened before breakfast, even before their pre-breakfast training. They had all got woken up and brought out to the muddy ground where they did there training. There was a man there, with a noose around his neck, and the other end of the rope slung across the top of a rusty semi-truck trailer. General Monroe was absolutely furious. Apparently the man had some sort of 'old, pre-war, camera' that 'used film, but not batteries', had taken a number of pictures with it, and had been caught five miles down the dirt road trying to sneak off, back to Dystopia. He had been a spy, for the Maestro.

That made Aster angry. Everyone else, too. They all had reasons to hate the Maestro, and the fact that they couldn't kill him, but could only try - if they could - to run away from him, simply made their hatred worse.

The man had a number of used cylinders of film in his pocket, and General Monroe called Aster up towards him, where he stood next to the condemned man.

"HE -" The general pointed one angry finger at the spy, "Won't talk. Can you develop these… find out what they are pictures of?"

Aster looked at the spy, then looked away. There were burn marks on his face and all his fingernails were missing. She resolved never to betray General Monroe. Or at least not to be caught alive after doing so. He was every bit as bad as the Maestro. Down to bringing everyone out to witness the execution. It was only the fact that he was weaker that restrained him from stepping right into the Maestro's shoes. She looked at the film, her stomach roiling. She hated seeing people or animals in pain, especial un-natural pain. "I don't know… maybe someday. I've read books that talked a little about the old film cameras. You need a special room with only red lights, and some sort of chemical liquids to dip the film in. But I don't know what sort of chemicals they are, or where to get them. There was a photography studio in Dystopia, me and my family had a few pictures taken there, so there must be a way to do it, even now. But I don't really know what it is."

"Bugger it all." He glared at Aster as if it was somehow _her _fault that she didn't have a photography studio stowed away in her meager luggage, then tossed the cannisters of used film to Daniel Wolfkiller, who was standing nearby, a grim expression on his face. "Burn those."

Aster took a note of Wolfkiller's set face. When she had stolen a bottle, so long ago, from the little love-nest he had made in a shed at the Zoo, Wolfkiller had looked angry. But he hadn't been ready to kill her. In fact he had tried to help her, in his own way. Perhaps he was much like an animal, in that regard. In animals, visible anger was often only a warning, meant to avoid trouble before it got to the point of killing. When it did get to the point of actual killing, then it was all business. And in times like these, human beings were turning into little more than animals. She remembered the scramble for loaves of moldy, stale bread a few mornings ago, and felt ashamed. That what she and other human beings had become. Animals scrambling and clawing for food and territory.

_No, not what we've __become__. _Aster tried to make herself feel better. _What the Maestro has __made__ of us. If it hadn't been for __HIM__, keeping us down and terrorizing us, we probably would have rebuilt things by now. Made a decent world for ourselves, not a rotten world like this one where we have to choose between two different torturing socipaths to keep ourselves safe. And perhaps we will make a decent world yet. In Wisconsin. If we can figure out just what guilty secret the people there are keeping in time to save ourselves from it._

"I'm sorry… my…my Lord." The condemned man was actually crying. "I didn't _want_ to betray you. I didn't want to be here at all. You don't understand. The Maestro… he has my wife and kids."

This last comment threatened to bring forth sympathy from most of the audience, until General Monroe simply said: "We've all got wives and kids. Most of us." He glanced at the female members of the army, then at Aster. "Or husbands and kids. Or _something_ we care about."

He didn't wait for the man to say anything more, and simply turned to the men holding the rope. "Hang him."

The men on the other side of the rusty trailer pulled, hauling the end of the rope and the condemned man up in the air. It was not a good way to hang someone. Dropping someone from a gallows, or even off a stool at least snapped their neck instantly. Pulling them upwards with the noose killed them slowly by strangulation.

Aster hated watching it. She had hated the man when she heard he was a dirty spy, then when he mentioned his wife and children in the hands of the Maestro, she felt sorry for him. He reminded her of the starving tiger in the cage at the Maestro's palace. A once noble animal in a trap it never deserved. She felt ashamed of herself. A good person, like the _heroes_ that had died trying to defeat the Maestro would have done something. Saved the man. Or spoken up at least.

But Aster was no hero. She couldn't save the man, she wasn't strong enough to fight General Monroe, and no words she had would have changed his mind. All she would have done is maybe gotten herself hung, too. And for what? If the man had gotten away with his spying, he would have brought the Maestro straight to the Underworld. She would undoubtedly be either raped to death or burned alive, along with everyone else there. Even the little kids, younger than Aster had been when the Maestro had taken her for the first time.

As the rope tightened, the man's face turned red and he kicked violently, drumming uselessly against the metal sides of the semi trailer with a hollow, metallic noise, and she could smell it as he emptied himself into his pants. The drumming sound gradually slowed, like a frantic heartbeat coming to a stop, and then there was eerie silence. The whole thing made her sick. 'General' Monroe was just like the Maestro, down to arbitrarily executing his 'enemies' and forcing other people to line up and bear witness to it. The condemned man had even called him 'My Lord' at the end, just like people had called the Maestro.

_No, maybe not __just__ like the Maestro. _Aster tried to convince herself, needing to believe that she was in a _GOOD_ army. _The hanging took a few minutes, but it was more merciful than burning people to death. And we did it to protect ourselves and our children, not to just keep raping and stealing from people like the Maestro. And maybe General Monroe doesn't __know__ there's a faster way to hang people. I'm probably the only one here who has read __Robin Hood__ and the other old, old stories about the days when people build gallows and things._

_But he did __torture__ him first. _The guilty voice in her insisted. Aster tried to justify it to herself, and couldn't. It was _EVIL._ She couldn't convince herself it was not. That made the self-appointed 'General' Monroe _EVIL. _Just like the Maestro.

But then… what did it make her? Because as lost in bookish thoughts as she often was, Aster still had far too wide a streak of honesty to deny her own truth to herself. That if she could have saved her father, and Thumb, and the animals and the Zoo by torturing someone who was going to betray them, she would have done so. General Monroe had implied that he had children that he had come to care about. He'd be a poor father, if he let the Maestro get his hands on them.

It was animal behavior, but in some ways animals were more honest and wiser than human beings. Aster remembered when she was a child, reading articles in tattered, yellowing, Pre-War magazines that were about cooking and fashions. The articles, mostly written by women, had simpered and sobbed endlessly about the evils of _guns._ From the exaggerated tone of fear of the authors, one would have thought that they were under the belief that _guns _ran down the street shooting themselves. What especially annoyed Aster was that the articles always claimed that _guns _should be made illegal _for the children._ That sort of comment got absolutely nothing but contempt from Aster, who had seen the behavior of mother animals both in the Zoo, and in the wild. There wasn't a single mother mammal or bird who wouldn't defend her young with every tooth and claw they had, and as viciously as they had to. Yet these human so-called 'mothers' from before the war went on endlessly about how disarming themselves would make their children 'safe'.

_How?_ Aster had often wondered then, and wondered again now. _How does a small, weak woman propose keeping her children '__safe'_ _from a man three times as large and strong as herself, if __NOT__ with a __GUN__? Or at least a hell of a big stick!?_

Probably, Aster decided, they just hadn't had the stomach for violence, for either necessary evil or justice. No stomach for _blood. _Rather than act like adults and _get_ the stomach for it, they had simpered and whined and claimed that rendering themselves completely unable to defend their own children somehow magically made their children 'safe'.

It was obvious nonsense in retrospect. Being helpless to defend themselves against the Maestro certainly hadn't made ordinary human beings, even children, _safe_ from him. Quite the opposite, in fact.

General Monroe did not bother with a long speech of self-justification after the condemned man (much to Aster's relief) stopped kicking and went limp. He simply let the silence fill the air for a few seconds and said:

"If anyone else is spying for the Maestro, now would be a good time to turn yourselves in. I'll let you live, if you admit it. If you don't, and I find out, I'll hang you."

There was silence. Nobody else was spying for the Maestro. Or at least they weren't willing to admit doing so. General Monroe looked around for a few seconds, then said: "There's a new law. Cameras and film are no longer allowed here in the Underworld. If any of you have either, you have 24 hours to turn them in to be destroyed."

Aster thought about the new Law for a second. It was _mostly_ a good idea, but only _mostly._ She had a better one, one that would give hope to the army and _power_ to General Monroe. She raised her hand, which got an annoyed look on the part of General Monroe.

"What do you want, Zookeeper?"

"My… Sir… the cameras and film are dangerous if people take the wrong pictures and somehow get them to the Maestro. But I don't think you should destroy them. At least, not all of them. Keep a few cameras and all of the film."

The ex-bandit who now headed his own army looked even more annoyed. "May I ask what the hell for?"

"It's… well. I think we have a good chance of escaping from here, to Wisconsin. If we do, we'll have children and grandchildren someday. I know some people are keeping diaries of their lives, in hopes that their children can read it. I just thought… if _you _kept the cameras and film yourself, they would be _safe_. And it would be good to take pictures of everyone in the army. We can't develop the film _now, _but someday our children or grandchildren will be able to. I think it would be good to leave them our faces, along with our stories."

This was the first time General Monroe had looked even slightly pleased with anything Aster had to say. He stopped scowling, which was probably as close as he ever got to a smile, and nodded.

"Fair enough. I have a heavy box where they should be safe. I'll come up with a schedule for taking pictures later, when I've figured out how much film we actually have on our hands." He walked over to a metal and wooden crate, and took the top off. "Anyone who has cameras and film can put them in here, no questions asked, for the next 24 hours. After that, I'll hang anyone found with either."

He waited until the crowd wandered off, then went up to Aster. "Very good, Zookeeper. Keep feeding me power." He said under his breath, so that no-one else could hear. "Feed me so I can keep you, and everyone else here alive."

Aster did not feel particularly proud of herself for 'feeding' General Monroe power. He was as much of a monster as the Maestro, as much of a _Vampire_ as Morbius, in his way. One who fed on power, rather than blood. He wanted to be a _King,_ just like the Maestro, which was probably why he was so fixated on his _Seed Corn. _A _King_ needed someone to rule over, to boss around and bully, or he was nothing. The only thing that consoled her was that feeding him kept other people, some of them little kids, alive as well as herself. Perhaps she, or they, would live long enough to someday rid themselves of those who thought they were _Kings_, to rule over them.

She hated herself for not being a hero, like the ones in the Hall of Fallen Heroes. A hero would have found a way to keep everyone alive without making lousy deals with a sociopath, a would be _King_ like Erick Monroe. But she was not a hero, she was just a lousy, weak woman, not much older than a girl, who couldn't have children like other women, and couldn't climb over the high wall like a man. A freak whose only use was that she knew the layout of the Maestro's palace and had read more books than everyone else in the Army put together.

Other than giving more power to General Monroe in the form of the respect he got as the 'keeper' of cameras and film that would be a record of their faces, the main result of the new law was that the next day, the box was filled not only with cameras and film, but a number of other objects. Apparently some people were not entirely certain what a camera actually was, and had turned in an amazing variety of pre-war objects and devices, including empty deodorant sticks, toys, and something that General Monroe had no idea what it was, but Wolfkiller smirked at it and said it was a 'vibrator'. Aster didn't see what was so funny about the object, and if it had once 'vibrated', it didn't do so any more. Wolfkiller whispered something to General Monroe, which got the same sort of smirk from him.

The 'vibrator' and other objects which were not cameras were put out on a long table for the former owners to reclaim (although nobody reclaimed the 'vibrator' and after a few days it was consigned to the scrap heap as there was a small motor in it that could be salvaged for the metal). Even all of the cameras and film were not useful. Before the war, people had been using mostly a type of camera called 'digital', which nobody in the camp could get to work, and from what Aster recalled from a few magazine articles she had read about them, they could not be made to work without batteries (or another power source), as well as a _computer._ The nearest power source and _computers _were in Dystopia, and nobody was inclined to go there, to try to get the 'digital cameras' working. They were consigned to the scrap heap as well.

Some of the film had already been used. This made General Monroe scowl, despite both Wolfkiller and Aster pointing out that it _could_ possibly have been used a long time ago, before the owners ever got to the Consolidated Iron Mines. For all they knew, it had been used before the War, and never developed. General Monroe ordered all the used film to be burned, regardless. Aster protested slightly at this, saying that pictures that might have been taken before the War might be of interest to their children or Grandchildren, when they learned how to develop the stuff. Then she dropped it, as General Monroe rightly pointed out that there were plenty of pictures in old books and magazines, and he was more interested in making sure that their children and grandchildren had a chance to survive, than leaving them a few more picture of 'the idiots who blew up their world'.

That the people who lived before the war were idiots was one thing Aster agreed with everyone else on. Or rather, they were fools. No doubt they were smart, they built all sorts of wonders which now existed only for a privileged few in Dystopia. They had hot and cold water with no more effort than turning a knob, rather than laboring at a pump or fetching it in buckets. Warm houses without having to chop and carry wood. All the fruit, vegetables, meat, and desserts they wanted any time of year for very cheaply. Instead of the cold stale bread, and gruel, and half-rotten squashes and onions, and maggoty walnuts, and bland boiled pork soup that everyone in the Army of Darkness was eating, and most of them more than grateful that there was even that much.

But were they satisfied with this paradise? Oh no! Rather than mind their own business and be grateful for the wonderful world they had, they had to obsessively poke their nose into everyone else's lives. It was amazing the completely trivial and pointless things that didn't even affect them at all, mostly having to do with sex, God, and money, that they worried about, until they finally blew themselves and their whole world up over it. Spoiled fools, all. All wanting to be _Kings_ over everyone else, and bully them around.

Apparently the conclusion Aster had come to a long time ago, about leaving other people and their Gods alone so long as they and their Gods left you alone was too difficult for them to wrap their little minds around. Aster told some of the other people in the Army about articles she had read in Pre-War magazines, complaining about having to 'live in the same neighborhood as homosexuals'. There was little sympathy for the sort of spoilt, whining children who got upset over a little buggery a few doors down from people who had to worry about the Maestro taking the best of their daughters by force and raping them to death.

Well, the questions about sex, God, and money had been answered for them by General Monroe, at least so long as they were part of the Army of Darkness. He didn't have the time or inclination to cater to spoiled brats who wanted him to tell other people how to live their lives. You could have any sort of sex you wanted, so long as it wasn't the sort that could get a woman pregnant. You could worship whatever God or Gods you wanted. You could have whatever money or other sorts of wealth you earned. Not that there was much money, or much of anything else around.

Provided, of course, that it did not interfere with your duties in the army, and you left others alone to have whatever sort of sex, Gods, or money they wanted. If that wasn't to your liking, well, then General Monroe had plenty of rope. If poor little you just couldn't live with how other people lived their lives, it was faster and cheaper to hang you, than to try to control everyone else.

Nobody chose to be hung, at least not for that reason. There was something to be said for there being just one _King, _rather than a whole nation of everyone wanting to tell everyone else what to do. As much as having any _King _sucked, at least it was sometimes possible to please a single man. So long as he was at least half sane. Nobody could please a whole country full of would-be _Kings_, all of whom disagreed on what they wanted other people to do.

Eventually, the unused film was sorted out, and organized with the cameras. It turned out that that there was more than one size of film, and it each size had to go in a camera made to fit it, which Aster found stupid and redundant. There were a few obscene jokes about this circulating around the Army camp for a few days, having to do with men's and women's privates coming in different sizes, and the fact only being discovered after a couple was married. The jokes really weren't all that funny, but people laughed at them anyways. Discrepencies in sizes aside, it was determined that there was enough unused film (though how good a condition it was after nearly 100 years was unknown) to take one individual picture of everyone, and one 'family' picture. Everyone's name was written down, and the order of picture taking was determined by lottery, so that nobody got a better chance at the film that looked to be in better condition than anyone else. If a person wished, they could include pets (of which there were not very many) or special belongings in either or both pictures. So that possible future viewers would know the names to go with the faces, when they had their picture taken, there was a small paper sign with their name on it next to them. Aster had her 'individual' picture taken as well, but not a family picture. She had no family. She held her own pictures of her father and sister when she had her own picture taken, with their names written on the sign below hers.

It was the best she could do. It was the best they could do. They didn't even know if the pictures would ever be developed.

Everyone there was part of the Army of Darkness, although only those who were 13 years of age and older were required to train for fighting. The younger children still had duties, though. Anyone capable of walking and talking had to work. Some of them dismantled machines (such as the useless 'digital cameras') and sorted out their innards for re-use or melting down. Others chopped up what little food they had to eat. A few children balked at this. Generally a day or three without eating made them more cooperative. One boy however, threw a tantrum and pounded the ground with his fists and absolutely refused to chop onions 'because they made him cry'. General Monroe finally had to drag him bodily over to a large chamber in the mines where there were several pigs, and (according to rumor) threatened to 'cut off his little pink cock and feed it to the pigs'. Whatever it was that had happened, the boy worked after that. Sulkily, and often giving looks of mixed fear and anger whenever General Monroe, or Aster, or anyone else he perceived as having any sort of rank in the Army of Darkness (which to his mind was everyone but his parents) walked past him. But he worked.

For those over 13 (but not so old they were frail) there was training. Hard training. Mainly in the dark.

They were, after all, the Army of Darkness. Learning to fight in the dark was one of the few advantages they would have over the Maestro's guards. They ran around and around the icy, rutted ground where the trucks were parked, learning to tell where the ruts and holes were by the fact that they were slightly darker than the higher ground. Often they tripped, stumbled, and scraped themselves. They got up and kept running. They learned to feel the ground with their toes, and to keep their knees slightly bent, so as to take a fall better. Sometimes they were cut badly enough that Aster or a few other people who knew anything about medicine were called over to bandage, cauterize, or stitch their cuts. There seemed to be plenty of alcohol for disinfecting wounds, which Aster wondered about, but was thankful for.

It was cold, and Aster often shivered, and her lungs burned from the effort of running fast and hard and with barely a rest. When that happened, she thought about the heat of standing in front of the Maestro's giant fireplace, like standing before the gates of Hell, and how much she hated him. She thought about him killing all the children of the people in the Army, and dragging her off to be raped, this time to death. Then she bit her lip and ran faster.

There were other exercises, sit ups, push ups, pull ups. The latter two, Aster was not good at. Very few of the women were, but they were made to do them anyways. Then there were weapons. The women, and the younger children in the army (those between the ages of 13 and 16) were trained with bows and slings. The men with axes and spears and swords. They shot and hacked at dummies that were sometimes clothing filled with straw, and sometimes pieces of logs pegged together in the rough shape of a man. Usually there was little left of the cloth and straw dummies by the end of the night, and they were sewn back together and reshuffled by the youngest children during the day, only to be hacked apart again the following night. Eventually, once the women and younger children got fairly decent with their bows and slings, they were taught to hit light colored dummies by shooting _over_ a few rows of dark colored dummies. Aster understood. General Monroe needed as many people as he could get in his army, even the _Seed Corn, _but he planned to put them in as protected a position as he could. If they won, most of the _Seed Corn_ would survive. If they lost, they Maestro would hunt them down regardless of whether they had fought or not, and kill them. Unpleasantly.

All of them were initially trained with _guns._ General Monroe had a fairly large supply of guns and ammunition, stolen over the years. Fairly large… but not as large as he would have wanted. There was a target range in one tunnel of the mine, where the sound would not carry to the outside and be heard. Everyone in the army was allowed three sessions, where they shot 50 times each, only those who were best at shooting were allowed to continue training with the guns.

Aster, oddly enough, was one of the few women who was any good with the gun. This seemed to greatly please General Monroe, though Aster wasn't sure why.

"Wolfkiller said you used to hunt a lot with a bow." General Monroe said, when he saw the close groups of holes on Aster's target. "Perhaps that's why you're good with a gun."

"The gun isn't all that much like the bow." Aster disagreed with him, but the General still seemed pleased, and whispered something in Daniel Wolfkiller's ear, which seemed to upset him. At least he shook his head. Perhaps he didn't think the bow and gun had much to do with each other, either. Even the gun, though, they often had to train with in the dark. Aster and the other members of the Army of Darkness at first thought this to be impossible. Then they learned that guns not only made noise and death, but light as well. They would shoot together in groups, one of them would be chosen to shoot a single bullet, then the rest of them would aim during the brief flash of light. They hit their targets most of the time.

There was praise from General Monroe for those who were best at shooting or other parts of their training. At least, there was praise on rare occasions. More often, there were screams from him at those who did not meet whatever standards he had set. Often Aster wondered if his standards were realistic or not. Certainly not very many people met them very often. And there were various motivational speeches. Often, General Monroe would bring out some of the youngest children, lift them onto a rough table so everyone could easily see them, and remind them that if they didn't train hard enough, and failed in raiding the Maestro's palace for all the things they would need in order to get to and survive in Wisconsin, the Maestro would burn the men alive and rape the women to death have the youngest children on his dinner table. Whereas if they did succeed, there would be plenty of children, food, women and other good things for everyone in Wisconsin. The people there were no doubt strong and good looking and well off, what with all the plants and trees and water there, and would be fine wives for some of the boys and men and fine husbands for some of the girls and women.

Sometimes he even brought out a boy and a girl, "Evan" and "Gina", black haired twins, only 5 years old, that he said were his own, and that he wanted them and all the other children to have a 'decent life away from this hell'. Aster believed the fraternal siblings were his, but wasn't entirely sure whether as cruel a man as General Monroe actually cared about the 'gifts' he had given some woman he had likely raped, or whether he was just putting on an act to humanize himself to the members of the Army of Darkness. Then again, perhaps he did care about them. Even the Maestro had cared about his unborn son. And General Monroe obviously wanted to be _King. _And all mortal _Kings _wanted a dynasty. Aster was not too fond of the notion of a dynasty of sociopathic descendents of Erick Monroe, but said nothing. For the time being, she needed him. And the children were still young, so there would be plenty of time and opportunity once they got to Wisconsin, for her to undo whatever General Monroe's loathsome political ambitions might be.

In the meantime, seeing the children seemed to motivate the members of the army, and that was no easy task. It could not have been easy to find a way to motivate an army composed of both men and women. And General Monroe had to use the women. As well as the older children. He was fighting against dangerous odds, and needed every advantage he could get. Even putting the _Seed Corn _at risk (though he was training them to be in the safest position he could). But men and women were motivated by different things, and what motivated one gender was often meaningless or even repugnant to the other.

Aster had read enough about wars to be aware that one (usually) unspoken reward for men in a winning army was the right to rape women in a country they had just defeated. But General Monroe, though Aster was sure that he and his closest men were probably rapists and worse, could hardly promise the men in his army rape as a reward, without alienating the women in his army. Besides which they would have only a very short time to loot what they needed from the Maestro's palace. They wouldn't have time to waste on rape.

Fortunately, he had a few outs, as regarded motivating a mixed gender army. The Maestro's behavior was SO horrific, that it was easy for General Monroe to come up with numerous reasons for pretty much _everyone _to hate him. And although General Monroe would not promise the men in the army the right to rape the women in the palace, he did tell them that they could take any of the Maestro's women back with them, provided the women were 'willing to go', as they could 'always use more '_Seed Corn'. _This seemed to satisfy everyone, except Aster, who felt that the _Betty's _from the palace would be soft and untrained and most likely a liability.

But she said nothing. They would either adapt, or die. It made no difference to her, either way. Although it had been less than a year since she had been one of them herself, it seemed a lifetime ago, to Aster. She had left so much behind, since then. Her family. The Zoo. Dystopia itself. Aster no longer felt like a _Betty, _not that she had ever really fit in with the rest of the _Betties, _anyways. They had never really accepted her, and had hated her as a murderer in the end. So she really didn't care if they stayed in the palace or joined the Army, or if they lived or died. She had herself, and those with a decent chance of survival to worry about. That, and revenge.

But the manner in which General Monroe trained and motivated the Army of Darkness, with combined rewards, punishments, and promises of future rewards was actually familiar to her. It reminded her of how she had trained Mr. Stubs, the Lynx, to jump through a hoop.

She said as much to General Monroe one day, when no-one else was near to listen.

"I know what you're doing with the way you're training us." She said.

"What are you talking about?" General Monroe seldom appreciated Aster's skewed observations on life.

"Rewarding us for doing what you want and punishing us for failing. It's Skinnerism."

"Skinner - what?" The man made a sour face like unsweetened lemonade was coming out of Aster's lips.

Aster spent a few minutes explaining how animals were conditioned by rewarding and punishing them, and was about to start on explaining the theory of random and intermittent reinforcement, when General Monroe cut her off with a slice of his hand.

"I don't want you talking about this Skinnery crap to the rest of my army. Or I'll skin you."

"I'm not going to talk about it to the rest of your army." Aster said, leaving General Monroe more than a little confused as to why Aster had even mentioned it to _him._ Or what motivated her, if it wasn't him. But he said nothing.

One of the parts of their training that neither Aster nor any other woman was good at was a tall, wooden wall. The men, for the most part, were able to leap up, grab the top of the wall with their hands, and pull themselves over it. But none of the women could. Aster tried it numerous times, thinking the fact that she was taller even than a lot of the men would help her. But it didn't. Tall she might be, but she lacked a man's strength. All she got were bruises and splinters for her efforts.

"You will not be able to get over that wall." General Monroe told her, after watching her try once. "No woman can. Or damned few. And you're not going to be one of them. Stick to what you're good at. Go practice some more with the gun."

Some of the men in the army, mainly older ones, were being taught to drive the trucks. It made training for the rest of them harder, because every day (the trucks ran only during the day) the wheels from the trucks had made hundreds of new ruts in the ground, and they had to relearn the terrain as they ran. Often, the trucks would get stuck in the mud, and another truck would have to pull it out with chains. The constant traffic not only made new ruts, but it made the mud softer, and it sucked at the feet of everyone in the Army of Darkness as they ran. The whole area around the mines stunk badly, with sweat, rotten food, pit toilets, and burned oil and rubber. A few people fell ill, and there were several injuries and two deaths from the training. The deaths made them hate the Maestro worse then ever, after all (as General Monroe was quick to point out), it was that Green Bastard's fault that any of them were in the current situation in the first place. They trained harder, and would often either piss on (if they were men) or stomp and spit on anything green that they happened to see.

Aster and almost everyone else were able to run for 15 minutes now, without stopping. The truck motors never seemed to stop either. The day time practice of those learning to drive the trucks kept them all awake for a few days, until they learned to sleep in spite of it. As soon as the sun went down, they were rousted out for training, whether they had managed to sleep or not. They ran around and around , in semi-exhaustion, listening to the motors of some of the trucks which were still running at night, either to draw power from the engines, or as mechanics worked at fixing any problems with them. They were old, and made grinding and popping noises, but they ran. This actually surprised Aster. Not that they were functional, but that there was fuel for them. She thought gasoline was only available in Dystopia. She asked General Monroe one day, when he came down into the mines to watch her shooting (she still did not understand why he was so interested in _her_ shooting in particular) where he got the gas for the trucks.

"There isn't any gas" General Monroe shook his head. "Those trucks are all alcohol burners. Modified engines. They sound and run like shit, but they work. We've got plenty of alcohol from the distillery. And we don't need them to work all that long, compared to what they were designed for."

Aster said nothing (though she now understood why there was so much alcohol around for disinfecting injuries gotten in training). At least *some* of the trucks would probably make the trip. And there were a lot of them. If necessary, one truck could pull more than one trailer. They would get there. Maybe. They would definitely take a hit in radiation, but perhaps not too badly. There was a lot of iron from the mines, and thick sheets of metal lined the inside of the trailers. It wasn't as good as lead, but they didn't have much lead.

The big problem was the windows on the trucks. They could only be partly covered with metal. The drivers had to be able to see. And glass offered little protection from the radiation. Whoever drove the trucks was going to take a heavy hit in radiation. Which was why General Monroe was training mostly older men to drive them. They weren't likely to be fathers, any more. In fact, they didn't have that much longer to live, from the looks of some of them. Either way, they weren't part of their _Seed Corn._

At least a few times a day, Aster tried to jump and reach over the high wall. The other women laughed at this, and a few called her insulting names that she didn't understand, like 'Puta'. General Monroe just shook his head when he saw it.

"You will not be able to get over that wall, Zookeeper." He told her every time he saw her fail. "No woman can. Or damned few. And you're not going to be one of them. Stick to what you're good at. Go practice some more with the gun."

Aster said nothing. It still seemed odd to her that General Monroe was so overly interested in _her_ shooting ability in particular. He had plenty of other men, and a few other women, who could shoot just as well. Yet he focused on _her_, above all the others. She frowned as she walked down to the tunnel that served as a shooting gallery. General Monroe did not do things for no reason. He always had a reason, for everything he did. Often, Aster did not like or agree with what his reasons were, but there were still reasons.

Aster was not sure what his reason was for being so interested in her, in particular, being able to shoot well. But she was sure there was a reason, and increasingly fearful that whatever the reason was, she was not going to like it.


	26. Chapter 26

Chapter 26. The Labyrinth

Aster's training turned into a blur. Sometimes her mind seemed as dark as the night. Day and night and time lost meaning. There was running and exercises, outside in the dark, wet, and cold, where she was constantly tripping and falling (though admittedly far less often than she had at first. Then more training, running through tunnels in an unused section of mine, where it was even darker (though admittedly warmer and drier), where one could easily run into a wall, or get lost. When they did get lost, nobody would help them. They either had to find their own way back, or stay lost forever. Eventually, they always found their way back, though sometimes it _seemed _like forever.

It was scary in the mines, and there were parts of it that were roped off, where neither Aster nor most of the other members of the Army of Darkness were allowed to go (on pain of extreme displeasure from His Royal Highness, General Erick Monroe). Sometimes there were strange noises from the roped off sections of the mine, and once or twice, there were screams. Aster tried not to think too much about what might be hidden, there in the darkness. She was a member of the Army of Darkness, and should not be afraid of the dark. Besides, it could be that the screams were just animals. There were a number of ways into the mine, and wild creatures sometimes came in, looking for shelter. Especially possums and squirrels. Which went into the cook pots, once they were tracked down. They needed every bit of food they could get.

Eventually, they learned to remember where they were running, and to mark their way with chalk, or unroll a long thin spool of thread, so they could find their way back. The mines and the darkness seemed less frightening to everyone than they had been. Though the odd noises never became any less creepy, and were often the subject of discussion in the minutes before they went to sleep. Some few members of the Army thought that perhaps the _Vampire, _Morbius, had somehow followed the people from Wisconsin, first to Dystopia, and now to the mines, and was now haunting the depths of the place. This did not seem at all likely to Aster. Morbius drank blood. Human blood, specifically, and if he had been in the mines, there would have been either attacks or deaths due to him. Nevertheless, a few of the members of the Army occasionally asked Dave Miller and the other people from Wisconsin if they thought the screams could perhaps have been from Morbius, or his unfortunate victims. To which the answer was always 'No', but Aster sensed an odd hesitation in the way they spoke, making her wonder afresh what it was that they were hiding about the _Vampire._

Besides, the screams were probably just animals. She hoped. The twisting stone corridors of the mines tended to distort sound.

Often, Aster would see General Monroe's two children, Evan and Gina in a well lit chamber of the mines being tutored, by Trask or Lucy, or a few other people. Sometimes they were taught reading and math, sometimes manners, sometimes they did exercises or learned weapons. She heard that they were being taught to ride horses, but only during the day so far. Their father treated them like they were a treasure of some sort, down to having at least two guards near them at all times. Aster sometimes she wondered whether they were his _only_ children, or merely the only ones he cared for, for some reason. She wasn't about to ask him. There were a lot of things she thought they ought to have been taught, but weren't. She was afraid to mention what they were, to General Monroe. He seemed to have it in mind that his children ought to be groomed to be _Royalty_ of some sort. Which confirmed her suspicions that Monroe had ambitions to be a _King_ of some sort. After all, all _Kings_ wanted a dynasty. Even the Maestro, though there was no mere human woman capable of giving him one.

Well, Evan and Gina were not going to be a _King _and _Queen._ Not if Aster had anything to say about it. Not only did the people who lived in Wisconsin undoubtedly have their own rulers, and would surely be rather unwilling to accept foreign ones, but Aster had had enough of _Kings. _She didn't want _King _and _Queen_ Evan and Gina any more than she wanted _King _Erick Monroe, or _King _Maestro. Well, they were young. It would be ten or more likely fifteen years, before they would be able to rule, and a lot could and would happen between now and then. Especially since General Monroe would have far less influence, once they got to Wisconsin. In fact, from the frail looks of him and the way he often coughed, he might not even live much longer.

Aster certainly didn't want to _kill _Evan and Gina they were just little kids, no more responsible for the sort of monster their father was than the unborn _Gamma _child that had ripped it's way out of Betty… Patricia, had been responsible for the things the Maestro had done. No, she wasn't cruel enough for a pre-emptive political murder, but she could and would certainly _influence_ them, so that they wouldn't even want to be _King _and _Queen.. _Sometimes she would entertain them, making toys for them out of sticks and string and bits of lumber scraps, and telling them certain carefully selected stories she knew, such as one about a tailor who posed as a prince, only to be given a magic needle and find that there was more wealth and happiness to be found as a tailor, than as a ruler. Or another one about a boy who was turned into a squirrel by a witch, and spent seven years cooking for her, and when he became a human again, became the most famous and wealthiest chef in the entire kingdom. General Monroe occasionally listened as Aster told his children stories, but did not seem to realize what she was doing.

Sometime late in February (or so Aster thought, she had lost track of the nights and days in the Underworld). General Monroe came down, as he often did, to see Aster practicing with the gun. He looked closely at her targets, which had groups that could be covered with his hand, from 75 feet away.

"That's really very good." He said. "You're different than most women. You weren't ever afraid of the gun."

"I was at first." Aster said. In fact, she had been terrified at first. She wasn't sure why, now. She had gotten used to it.

"Really." General Monroe seemed to be in thought. "Well, you didn't seem like you were."

"Well, I was."

The older man gazed at her for a moment. "Indeed. That's… interesting."

Aster failed to see what was so interesting about it. General Monroe thought for a few seconds on whatever it was he found interesting, then said: "I want you to come with me."

Aster frowned. Being unexpectedly summoned by someone with power was seldom good. "Did I do something wrong? Am I in trouble?"

"No. In fact, you might be able to help all of us."

Apparently she wasn't in trouble. Or perhaps she was. Her frown deepened. 'Helping' everyone in the Army of Darkness was not likely to be some easy, trivial task. She had long worried as to exactly why General Monroe had been so interested in her shooting ability in particular, and now it seemed that she was about to find out.

She followed General Monroe down several narrow, poorly lit tunnels of the mine, until they got to the chamber that served him as a combination bedroom and headquarters. He opened the rough wooden door. Daniel Wolfkiller was inside, sitting on a wooden chair with faded blue paint. General Monroe pointed to another, nearly identical chair. Thankfully, not the very uncomfortable one that Aster had once been made to sit in.

"Sit." He ordered her.

Aster pulled the chair a few feet away from Wolfkiller, and sat, looking and feeling not at all happy. General Monroe sat down in another chair, this one made of pale, new wood, with leaves carved in it. Aster found that interesting. It was a _new_ chair. There were not many people actually making furniture, or anything else, any more. Most of it was simply scavenged from what had been made before the War. Apparently someone in the Underworld had woodworking tools and a fair amount of skill in using them.

General Monroe studied Aster for a moment, as if she were some new, raw, recruit, in the Army. Someone whose use and worthiness were still highly questionable, at best. True, she had only been in the Army for a few months, but that was just as long as almost everyone else. He folded his hands together.

"Let me ask you something." He said. "What would be the easiest, fastest way to shut off all the power in the Maestro's palace?"

"There's no _easy_ way to do it." Aster felt compelled to correct what she perceived as a wrong assumption. "But the way that would be easier than anything else… there's a room with fuse boxes. But there's always two guards by the door. With guns. Machine guns, I think, from before the War."

The General looked at Daniel Wolfkiller. "Have you seen this room?"

The former horsemaster shook his head. "My quarters were in the stables. I was seldom allowed into the Maestro's palace at all, and then generally only in the throne room for some special occasion or the other. It would have been very suspicious for me to wander around just anywhere. Only the Maestro's women, staff, and special favorites were allowed in most parts of the palace."

"Women. Like her. I wish to God that this Doctor Llewellyn you told me about were still alive. Or that we could find that nurse of his. Or perhaps not. She'd be too old, and might not be any good with the gun."

He looked at Aster again, not giving her time to dwell on the one question she had no answer to. "How well trained, really, do you think the Maestro's guards are?"

"Compared to us?" Monroe nodded, and Aster gave it a few moment's thought. "They have machine guns. And some tanks and other vehicles with guns and weapons. But… I don't think they are really trained all that well. They know how to march, mainly because the Maestro likes them to parade around sometimes for him. But I think they depend mostly on people being afraid. Afraid of them, and the weapons, and the Maestro. Especially the Maestro. They used to beat me… and.. and do stuff to me. But they were in groups. And I'm not as strong as a man, no matter how hard I exercise."

It was a bitter admission and brought on bad memories. Aster swallowed and went on. "They're good at bullying helpless and weak and frightened people when they outnumber them. But compared to our army… no, I don't think they are well trained at all. I think either you or Wolfkiller would take any one of them out pretty quickly, if they weren't in a group and didn't have their guns. In fact, any of the men in the Army would. And they don't train at all in the dark. Which is why we do."

"I see." General Monroe looked tense. Aster's assumption that _he_ could take out one of the guards was probably wrong, given his condition, but she didn't need to know about that. "Listen to me. When we attack Dystopia, I need you to sneak into that palace, ahead of all the rest of us, and pull the fuses. You're the only one here who knows the layout of the palace, and the procedures there well enough to do it. I need those lights _out_."

Aster's heart began racing. "I… I don't think I can. There's two guards, I told you. With machine guns. They all know who I am. If they saw me, they'd kill me."

She felt ashamed. Ashamed of the little child in her that felt like crying out: _But I'm afraid!_ And ashamed of disappointing General Monroe. And as her head sunk down to hide the tears welling in her eyes, Aster realized that at some point in the past several weeks, she had started thinking of him as a real General, and not just someone who had pinned a title onto himself. After all, he did have a real Army, The Army of Darkness, and it seemed to Aster that even though she felt afraid, they were all becoming very well trained, and were not just a rabble or a joke.

_When does a fiction become REAL? _Aster wondered. _How many people have to believe it and live it, before a game is truth. Before it's REAL. And when do I become REAL? Real again? The way I was before the Maestro. Before I was afraid all the time?_

"Stop crying!" General Monroe ordered her. "You think we aren't all scared? That you're special or something?"

"I.. I'm sorry." Aster wasn't sure what she was apologizing for.

"Now, you listen to me." General Monroe said. "Think about the animals in your zoo. A lot stronger, and faster than you, weren't they? But they were inside the cage and you were outside it, weren't you?"

Aster nodded, wiping her face.

"That's because you were _smarter_ than them. You don't fight a stronger, faster animal face to face. You outsmart it. You don't even let it see you, if you can help it. You use the right weapon. Or if that's no good, you use the right bait, and lure it into a trap."

"Like you did, when you were a bandit." Aster pointed out. "Which is why you were a _successful_ bandit."

"Precisely." The man nodded once. "Jumping out from around the corner, shooting with a pistol when they have a machine gun would be _stupid._ You get close to them, distract them… then shoot them."

"But how do I get close to them?" Aster protested. "Everyone in the palace knows me. They'd kill me on sight, if they saw me."

"With the right bait. To start with, you won't look very much like yourself. We've got stuff to disguise you. Such as this…" He went over to a small, long chest, opened it, and took out a wig of golden blond hair. "I had a hell of a time convincing three women to part with their hair, to get this made. Try it on."

He handed her the wig and a few thin wire clips. Aster examined it. The wig was made of small bunches of blond hair carefully sewn to some sort of pre-war mesh cloth.

"Careful with it." General Monroe cautioned her. "It'll take hours to fix it if you tear it."

Aster put it on her head, and the General handed her a mirror, a round circle set into wood with several scratches and faded spots. Aster moved closer to the lantern and looked at her own reflection.

_I look like Thumb_. She thought. Or at least, a little like what Thumb would have looked like if she had lived to Aster's age. She was taller than Thumb would have ever been, of course, but the months of poor rations had thinned out her face and made her features thin and sharp like Thumb's had been. She wasn't about to share her intimate memories with General Monroe, though, and ran her fingers cautiously through the strands of hair. Having come from three women, there was quite a lot of it.

"It's heavy." Aster said. "Almost like Freya's golden hair."

"Freya? Someone you know?"

"No. From a story. From Viking mythology, I think." Aster turned her head and looked in the mirror from one side. "The Vikings had warrior women, like we do in our army. They were called Valkyries."

Aster thinking of fierce warrior women was definitely an improvement over Aster crying, at least so far as General Monroe's strategy was concerned. He needed her motivated, to do what needed to be done. She didn't believe in him, that much was obvious from her repulsed look whenever he carried out necessary discipline. But perhaps she could believe in herself. Or at least her stories. "Indeed. Perhaps you are a Valkyrie. Or could be. Tell me about these 'Vikings'. Then their stories."

Aster left the blond wig on her head, the better to remind her of Thumb and the Viking stories she had once read, and told General Monroe, as best as she could recall, what she knew of the Vikings and their stories. That they had live in Iceland, (or perhaps it was Greenland) a long time ago, traveled around in ships with sails, and waged war and robbed people (they had been fierce bandits, much like General Monroe). And that when one of their kings died, he had an elaborate funeral that involved putting his body in a ship, letting it go out to sea, and setting it on fire. General Monroe seemed to find this amusing, for some reason Aster couldn't understand. At least his lip quirked, and he made a rude noise that could have been a suppressed laugh.

Then Aster told some of the stories Vikings had told. About how the trickster God, Loki, had caused Thor's (or perhaps it was Odin's, Aster said) wife, Freya, to lose her hair, and when her husband had become angry and threatened to kill Loki, Loki had gotten some Dwarves to make Freya new hair out of solid gold beaten into strands as soft and fine as hair. About the Valkyries, who were female warrior angels who took the souls of dead warriors to Valhalla, the Viking heaven. And how the Vikings had their own stories about the end of the world, Ragnarok, where, rather than the War that had happened, the Gods would fight the Frost Giants, and in the end, all the Gods and Frost Giants would be killed in the battle Ragnarok, and only human beings would be left.

"No more Heroes or Villains." The leader of the Army commented. "This 'Ragnarok' sounds good to me. Better than the War we had. We've hardly any men left, and too many Villians. Especially that Green Bastard. Though, from what I here, there's plenty of men left in Iceland, and no Heroes or Villians there. So perhaps they did have their Ragnarok, after all. Or maybe the Viking gods are the only real ones, and are watching out for them. If I believed in any Gods, I'd try praying to them. I could use some divine intervention."

He turned his attention back to Aster. "As for you, you won't look a thing like yourself. And you can get close to the guards, if you just use the right bait."

"What bait?" Aster had a complex mind, but not one devious enough to understand what General Monroe was referring to."

"Seduction." He said simply. Then sighed. "The problem is, of course, from what I've seen of you, you're about as seductive as a mule. Which is a big problem. Tell me something, are you an _Ovoid_?"

Aster recognized the slang term for a lesbian. She flushed. "No… I like men. At least I think I do. Their pictures, anyway. I've never really met one I liked all that much in person."

Her mind flashed for a moment to a dream, nearly lost in years of horror, of a dark haired man, as tall as she was, and elegant as a prince from her books of fairy tales, standing next to her in a still intact Zoo. She pushed it away. That was just childhood wishful thinking. There was no more Zoo, and no prince for her. No man of any sort. The Maestro has ruined her for that.

"You don't need to _like_ a man to _seduce_ him." General Monroe explained. "In fact, it often helps if you don't like him. Just what you can get out of him. Seduction is pretty much of a lie. Which maybe is your problem with it. You're a lousy liar. Hell, you can't even keep your mouth shut most of the time. But tell me something… can you act?"

"Like in a play?" General Monroe nodded. "I think so. I used to do skits sometimes with Thumb… my sister. Back when I was a kid."

General Monroe did not mention that to a man as old as himself, Aster was still not much more than a 'kid'. "Do something for me, from a skit. Let me see if you're any good."

"Let me think… do you know the story Little Red Riding Hood? With the wolf?" The General nodded, and Aster decided that constituted permission. She thought for a minute, then put on an innocent, surprised face.

"My… what big _eyes_ you have, Grandma!"

She turned, making a sly, feral face, like a tiger hunting it's prey. "The better to _see _you with, my dear."

She turned, playing the role of Red Riding Hood again. "And what big _ears_, you have, Grandma!"

Again, the tiger face, and a voice with just a hint of a growl in it. "The better to _hear_ you with, my dear!"

She put on a slightly alarmed face. "And what big _teeth_ you have, Grandma!"

She turned, and her voice came out as nearly a snarl. "The better to _eat_ you with, my dear!"

Aster took off her tiger face, and looked at General Monroe anxiously. "Was that any good?"

"It wasn't bad." Actually, it was better than a lot of so-called 'actors' he had seen. Whatever she lacked in dishonesty, Aster could apparently make up for in imagination. But he didn't tell her that. He didn't need her getting a swollen head and deciding that she didn't need to go to any efforts.

"It's workable. It will probably help that men are stupid." He glanced at Daniel Wolfkiller. "They _want _to believe seduction. Even though they know it's a lie. So let me see how much work there is to do, when it comes to that. Show me how you would go about seducing me."

Again, Aster's heart started pounding, as if it would come out of her chest. She bit her lip to hold back the tears. "Don't want to."

"I don't care about your 'don't want to'. I told you, you're nothing special. Are you part of this Army or not?"

"I… I want to be part of the Army." Aster didn't have the words to explain that not only didn't she feel as if she were 'part of the Army', but that she didn't even feel part of humanity, and hadn't for a very long time."

"Then, obey your orders, soldier."

She swallowed. "I… I don't know if I can. I don't _like_ you." She refused to even use the word 'love' around someone as cruel as the General was.

"I told you, not liking someone makes seduction easier. Think of it as an act, as bait for a trap. You're trying to trick a man you hate, into a trap. If you trick him well enough, you'll get what you want out of him. Now tell me, who do you hate?"

That one was easy. "The Maestro."

Perhaps too easy. General Monroe shook his head. "You can't seduce the Maestro. Any more than you can seduce a hurricane. He takes what he wants. But from what Wolfkiller here tells me, you have other men you hate, don't you? Men who can be tricked. If you're clever enough to trick them. Do you know any men like that?"

One came to mind immediately. "Paul Rasse. Him and all his sicko friends."

"Him, then. If you can trick him, you can get what you want. You have things you want, don't you? If you can do this, if you can get the lights out, I'll give you anything you want, that's in my power to give. Tell me what it is you want. Do you want Rasse dead? If we find him, I'll give you his head on a platter."

"Dead…" Aster thought about that. A quick death was too easy, after what had happened to her, and her family. "I don't want him dead. I want him alive. I want Rasse alive and I want him to live, until I've made him suffer. Then I want him dead."

"It's hard to catch a man alive, but I'll tell people to try. I can't guarantee it, though. He may not even be in the palace when we attack. Is there anything else you want? Something easier? Jewels? Desserts?"

Aster had much of the magpie in her. She liked sparkly things. Jewels were tempting, though other than their value as trade goods, she was just as pleased with faceted and polished glass. As were desserts. Only those with high rank in the Army got desserts, and then only once a week. She did not have high rank in the Army and hadn't had an actual dessert since the Maestro had expelled her from his palace.

Still… things that pleased the eye and tongue were transitory, and not of that much use. She thought about everything in the Underworld, and what would be of the most use in the future. Her eyes half closed, as she thought about what she would need to do, to someday get revenge on the Maestro. There was a way, she was sure, but it was a slim chance in the far future, and there was so much to do between now and then, and she would need the cooperation of so many people. Not to mention the _Vampire_ himself. Aster had enough self-awareness to know that she lacked the leadership skills to simply persuade others into helping her, but there were other ways of getting cooperation. Bribery for instance. But how to get enough wealth to bribe enough people with, for years and decades? General Monroe hardly had enough jewels stashed away to begin to be anything like the amount she needed.

She thought about the book she had read a long time ago. There had been a woman in it, who had commanded a price no other woman had ever gotten. The book made it sound romantic, but Aster could only feel sick despair. The character in the book, Dagny, who had commanded a higher price than any other woman, had never been afraid and desperate like Aster was most of the time. She thought about Thumb, and her plans. There had been another character in the book, one who often was afraid, the one who had prayed to the God of Trains.

_In the name of what is best in us, I must now start this train._

There were no trains in the Underwold. But now Aster knew what she needed. She opened her eyes. "A truck."

This was not a request General Monroe had expected. "A what?!" He honestly hadn't understood her statement, so great was his astonishment. He had had women ask him for all sorts of favors before. It was his ability to grant favors, his _power,_ that attracted women. The sort of things they asked for were always the same. Jewels. Clothing. Food. Punishment for someone who had offended them in some way or another. Always easily granted, and never anything surprising.

A _TRUCK_ was definitely surprising. But then, Aster wasn't attracted to his power, which was unusual, so he shouldn't have been surprised she would have an unusual request.

"I want a truck. One of those rigs, and a long trailer. I want Wolfkiller here to teach me how to drive it, and I want to drive it to Wisconsin, and I don't want anyone else opening it to see what I'm going to put in it."

"And just what are you going to put in it?"

Aster was not about to tell anyone that. "Does it matter? You said I could have whatever I wanted. That's what I want. My own truck, to fill up any way I like and drive all by myself."

General Monroe shook his head. "There's no way to block all the radiation from the cabs. At least part of the windows have to be uncovered, to see. Whoever drives those trucks is going to take a heavy hit of radiation. That's why all our _Seed Corn_, our women, children, and younger men, are going to be in the trailers, surrounded by as much metal as we can carry."

Aster's lip curled. "Well, then there's no problem. I'm not part of our _Seed Corn_, am I?"

"No, but you're 30 years younger than anyone else whose going to be driving. You might not ever have children, but you've got plenty of years of your own life. And cancer isn't a fun way to go." In fact, it sucked. Monroe knew that from the tumors eating at his own guts. The price of too many trips through the wastelands, to rob hapless travellers from Dystopia. Lately he'd been smoking a pipe of opium twice during the day to keep functioning, and again at night, to dull the pain enough so he could sleep.

"I've no intention of dying of cancer." Aster said. "Take a look at the Millers and the other people from Milwaukee. They made the same trip, coming the other way, and none of them got cancer. If I'm right, there's a radiation cure in Wisconsin. And if I'm wrong, we're all screwed anyways, so it doesn't matter."

And perhaps they wouldn't be taking as much of a hit of radiation as Monroe feared. Aster had thought of a possible way of protecting even the drivers, late the previous night. But she wasn't about to mention it. Not until she knew if it was possible, and she wouldn't know if it was possible unless they could take the Maestro's palace. Which meant that, as repulsive as it was, she would have to find a way to do what General Monroe wanted. Damn him, and damn herself as well for being nothing more than a high priced whore.

"So, show me." General Monroe said. "If you want this _truck_ of yours."

Aster was still hesitant. "Good lord, I'm not going to rape you. I could get away with that as a bandit. Not as a General. Especially not with the famous _Zookeeper. _And you're not my type. You're too damn tall."

Aster wanted to ask if Wolfkiller could leave, so she at least would not have to humiliate herself in public. But then, she would be in public in the palace, if she actually went through with this. There were two guards in front of the room with the fuse boxes. Always two.

_I hate this, but I'll do it. For my truck. And to get even for Father and Thumb. And for the kids in the Army. Not for this bastard._

She recalled what she had read in books. The rather dull (or so she had found them at the time) romance books in the Maestro's palace, and other books she had read back at the Zoo and the Library, about human anatomy. She did not want to do this, but if she _were_ going to do it, she would do it (as it said in the book that had talked about trains) _superlatively._

What followed then was not anything like what General Monroe had expected from someone so apparently shy. He was too shocked to say anything for a few seconds. After that, he didn't want to say anything, and it was only the realization that Aster had actually opened his pants and was about to start handling him that shocked him into pushing her away.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" He roared furiously. "I told you to seduce me. Not… not that!"

"That's…" tears of confusion rose to her eyes. "That's what I was doing."

"Why the hell didn't you stop her?" He glared at Daniel Wolfkiller, who had looked pointedly away during the entire incident. As if it were somehow the horsemaster's fault.

"What did you expect?" The sneer was obvious in his tone. "I told you, she doesn't know how to lie very well."

"That's…" He shook with fury and frustrated lust. "That's not seduction. I told you, seduction is bait. It's… like the steam and smell of a pot of stew. What you were giving me was the whole bloody pot, with a cherry pie on top for good measure. Now, just how the hell do you expect to lure an animal into a trap, if the first thing you do is feed it before it even gets near the trap?"

"I don't know. It's…" Aster thought about the things she had seen other women, the _Betties,_ do and say at the Maestro's palace. "I've seen women do things like that. Teasing men, to get what they want, and never actually giving them anything. I… I don't like that. It's _CRUEL._ It's like dangling food in front of a hungry animal to make it more hungry, then snatching the food away and never feeding it. I used to punch other kids, back at the Zoo, for teasing animals that way."

A great deal of confusion became clear. Women were cruel creatures, except perhaps for this one. But cruelty and lies were what men responded to. Which perhaps said something about men, as well, that they would rather starve than eat, and preferred lies to the truth.

As for Aster Aversa, she was no more human that one of her zoo animals. Intelligent, yes, but miles away from the norm in her reactions. Wolfkiller had told the General what Dr. Llewellyn had had to say about Aster, a week ago when he had objected to what Monroe had planned for her.

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_Dr. Llewellyn had had words, of course. Medical terms from before the War. __Aspbergers__, mainly. But they had liked their neat labels, back then in their neat world, and such words were meaningless to Wolfkiller. He knew horses, and drink, and women, and killing. Not medical terminology. So Llewellyn described Aster to the horsemaster more simply, and perhaps more truthfully._

"_She's a __Monster__."_

_Wolfkiller snorted at the thought. "She's a girl. Hardly a monster like the Maestro."_

"_There's more than one sort of Monster. And to be a Monster, isn't the same as being evil. Angels are Monsters, if you think about it. What's wrong with her is actually far worse than what's wrong with the Maestro. Just not as loud. There's plenty of people like you the Maestro around, who would step into his shoes if they had his strength. Not a whole lot like her. That's why I need you to try to protect her._

"_Protect a __Monster__? What for?"_

"_Maybe it takes a Monster to fight one. So the way I see it, why not throw all the Monsters we can, at the Maestro. Maybe one of you will find a way to take him down. If not you, then her. Or perhaps this bastard Monroe you know.."_

"_I'd give Monroe better odds than Aster. He's stronger, anyways." In fact, Wolfkiller would give __himself__ better odds at taking down the Maestro than Aster. The girl might be a good hunter, but she lacked the killer instinct. The fact that plenty of killers such as himself and Monroe had tried, and failed, to defeat the Maestro didn't occur to him. He glanced at Llewellyn. "How about you? You're not a Monster? Not part of our exclusive little club?" _

"_No, I'm not."_

"_Aster's a monster, and you're not? You're far worse than she is."_

_Llewellyn shook his head. "The essence of a Monster isn't good or evil. It's purity."_

"_Purity?" Wolfkiller took a drink from a scratched bottle on the rickety table he had salvaged from some pre-War ruins and brought to the stables. "The Maestro's ripped her open. Had every hole on her, for all I know. She's been gang raped half a dozen times by Rasse and his friends. And you call that __pure__?"_

"_Oh, pah." Dr. Llewellyn waved one hand dismissively in the air. "Get whatever stupid notions you've picked up from the priests you claim to laugh at out of your head. To start with the idea that someone's soul can be sullied by something done TO them. And secondly, do you honestly think that purity has anything to do with sex? Just because most human beings have mixed sex with the impure for so many thousands of years that we can't tell the difference between the two any longer, and the priests have been making a con game out of it, doesn't make sex itself dirty. Really. Get your head out of that bottle for a minute and think. Can you really picture Aster selling herself like these women you're so fond of? Or leading a man on to get favors and then giving him nothing?"_

_He disregarded Llewellyn's advice about 'getting his head out of the bottle' and took another deliberate, long drink. "She's a __kid__. Not to mention an ice cube. I honestly can't picture her __choosing__ to fuck anyone at all. Even if the Maestro hadn't ruined her for it. Is that what you mean?"_

"_Oh. She could choose it. At least when she grows up a few more years. You'd be surprised. A man would be very, very lucky to get her interested. Or would be, if she hadn't been ruined inside by that Green Bastard. And if most men weren't too stupid to believe it."_

_The horsemaster took another drink. "I don't get it. How can both being a virgin, and fucking both be pure?"_

"_Let me show you." The doctor got up from his seat and picked up a chunk of coal from a bucket near the small iron stove that was in one corner of Wolfkiller's quarters, and drew a small glass of water from another bucket.. He poured a little water on one side of Wolfkiller's table then set the chunk of coal down on the other side. He waited a moment, then picked up the coal, and wiped the water away with his hand. "Now take a look. No mark where the coal was, and the part where the water was is wet, but not dirty, either. Now, watch this."_

_Dr. Llewellyn took a small pre-War folding knife with a faded red handle from his pocket, opened the smallest blade, and scraped across the coal, letting powdery flakes fall into the water in his glass. The previously clear liquid turned muddy, and when he poured a few drops of the liquid onto the table, it left an obvious black smear._

"_It's contamination that's impure, that make things dirty. And Aster has none of that. Any more than the Maestro. They're both monsters. Perhaps that's why he took her. To prove he was the strongest monster."_

"_You can hardly compare the two." Wolfkiller objected. "She's done a few bad things, stole from me once, but she's not pure evil, like him."_

"_No, she's not. The Maestro is pure, simple evil. Now Aster, she's more complex. Both good and evil. But not like the rest of us. Not muddied waters. More like" Llewellyn thought for a minute. "Like one of those mazes they sometimes print in the newspaper. Distinct black and white lines, in a complex pattern." Actually, Aster was more like the Mandelbrot set, but Wolfkiller wouldn't understand the mathematical reference._

_Wolfkiller took another drink. "I hate those bloody mazes. I never could solve them."_

"_Just try to keep her alive." Llewellyn sighed. "If we're very, very lucky, she might someday be part of a maze that even the Maestro can't solve."_

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"You… are a monster." General Monroe told Aster. "And a damned lucky one that I need you. Not to mention that I'm physically incapable. Got more cancer than guts in me, these past several months."

He sat down and tapped his fingers. "I think you can do this… but it's going to take work. I'm going to have to find someone to teach you what to do. For some reason you never learned what every other woman on the planet seems to know by instinct. Tell me… will you do it?"

She had already made her bargain for the truck. "I'll do it."

"Good. Come back tomorrow morning. I'll have someone here who can hopefully teach you something. Tomorrow afternoon, I'll have Wolfkiller start teaching you how to drive this _truck_ you want so badly. God only knows why you want to commit suicide in that particular fashion, but I don't really give a good god damn any more, so long as you carry out your part of the bargain. Now get out of here. Go to the kitchen and tell someone to bring me a damn bottle of wine."

Aster left, and General Monroe waited until he was sure she was out of earshot before shouting angrily at Daniel Wolfkiller.

"That's what you and that idiot of a Doctor call pure? That? I admit, she had me fooled before, but I ask her to seduce me, and she does _that? _When she obviously can barely stand me, and you call her _pure? _I've met whores purer than that!"

"Oh yes." Wolfkiller said. "Get whatever notions you've picked up from the priests you claim to laugh at out of your head. Because what she just did _was_ pure. It was one of two things I expected of her, based on what Llewllyn told me. And obscene, obviously. But pure. I told you that last week."

"You're crazier than she is!"

"It took me the longest damn time to work it out, even after Llewellyn explained it to me. But let me tell you a story. A long time ago, Aster stole a bottle from a shed, where I used to take whores. I thought at the time, she had a problem with _what_ I was doing. But eventually, that made no sense to me. She didn't have a problem with sex in the zoo animals, hell, she helped her father collect sperm from them. So, why did she have a problem with me?"

He waited a moment, then answered his own question. "It wasn't _what_ I was doing, but _how _I was doing it. Sneaking around. Paying for it. Contaminating what should have been pure - at least in her mind. Making myself _unclean. _Not that I would have stopped then, any more than I will now, for that. But if I'd known what the problem was, I would have handled it far better than I did. As it was, I gave her the right advice, in the wrong way. I should have been far more direct and specific in what I said. Even if I had been specific, I don't know. How do you explain to a child like she was that they will be punished for being good?"

"I don't know." General Monroe sat down, and thought. Wolfkiller had told him about what Llewellyn had said, that Aster would have (if she hadn't been ruined inside by the Maestro) make some man very lucky. At least, if the man weren't too stupid to believe it. Because, as he had realized before, most men (including himself) preferred lies to the truth, and starvation to being fed. Which said something interesting about the human race. "I don't know even know if she's the monster, or all the rest of us are."

"There's more of the us, than her." Daniel pointed out.

"Might makes right?" Monroe said. "In a practical sense, it does. But in an ethical sense?"

Wolfkiller said nothing to this. Monroe's head ached and the cancer was making twinges in his guts again. He needed to get some more opium. And he could never let himself smoke as much as he would have liked, to get rid of the pain entirely. He needed to be able to think, to plan. Probably he was addicted to the opium. Definitely he was, but it didn't matter. He didn't have that much time left, anyways. He wished like hell that he had some of the pre-War painkillers he had read about that left one's head clear. But they were just over the rainbow, the only place they still existed was Dystopia, and he could hardly go there and get them.

"Your Doctor Llewellyn was right about one thing." Monroe said, after a long silence. "The priests are pulling a con game. What is religion but a way to trick people into being good, without actually rewarding them? And who benefits from it? Those who aren't good, of course. Like most priests. If I were a priest, I'd pray like hell that it _is _only a con. That there aren't any actual Gods. Because if I were a God, and someone was using me as part of a con, I'd be pretty damned pissed. And Aster… I'd rather be a priest than her. It must be pure hell, to be her. To be a_ monster _with a conscience."


	27. Chapter 27

Chapter 27. The Making of a Monster

_I was a highwayman, along the coach roads I did ride_  
_With sword and pistol by my side_  
_Many a young maid lost her baubles to my trade_  
_Many a soldier shed his lifeblood on my blade_  
_The bastards hung me in the spring of twenty-five_  
_But I am still alive... __\- _Highwayman \- Johnny Cash

The result of all this was that the next day, in addition to continuing training with the Army of Darkness, Aster started extra lessons with two teachers. She did not enjoy either of her new lessons, and wasn't sure which of the two she disliked more.

Her first lesson, in the early morning, was in General Monroe's chambers. He had another woman, Aster wasn't sure who she was, but based on the fact that unlike all the other women in the Army, she was _clean,_ as if she had washed with soap, rather than just hot water and rough cloths, Aster figured she was probably General Monroe's personal whore. Her suspicions regarding at least the soap were confirmed, when Aster was given a bar of her own.

"Try to use as little as possible." General Monroe told her. "We don't have a whole lot."

Aster didn't know why that should be. Making soap wasn't that hard. You just needed ashes, water, and fat, and to be a little careful about what temperature you mixed things at. But then, maybe the fat was the problem. The Army of Darkness was filled with hungry people, and they needed every calorie they could get.

At first, the fact that Aster was obviously getting to wash with soap made the other members of the Army jealous, especially the women. They made some snide comments to her about being "Puta" and "Monroe's New Whore." At least, until Aster knocked down three of the rudest women (there were at least some advantages to being 6 or more inches taller than most of the other women in the Army), and General Monroe chewed them out and said that Aster was most certainly NOT his 'New Whore' and he had his Reasons for letting her use soap, and they would be told the Reasons if and when they Needed To Know. Which was to say, Never. After that, they were still jealous, but did not make their rude remarks where Aster could hear them. Besides which, Aster had about six inches of height and a corresponding amount of muscles more than most of the other women in the army. Fighting with her, even with a few friends - if the friends were other women - was a losing proposition. And the men didn't seem to care if Aster got to use soap or not.

Other than the soap, though, Aster didn't like the lessons. It was all so damned repugnant and _alien._ The woman who was teaching her (who wouldn't give a name other than 'Missy') moved much like the _Betty's _often had, when they were trying to get favors from the guards. She acted as if she were in the early stages of having sex with any convenient object, including bottles of wine, biscuits, the wooden support beams in the mine, her own clothing, and even the air itself. She would shift and open her clothing slightly, as if she were going to take it off, but then would stop after revealing only a few more inches of skin than had been seen before. Sometimes she would very lightly touch the General's hair, or chest, or leg, but rather than continuing to give the man himself attention (which is what Aster would have done if she had actually been at all interested in the man, rather than repulsed by him) she would then coyly move away and go back to doing something with whatever nearby object struck her fancy. In fact, it seemed to Aster that what Missy was doing was seducing pretty much anything and everything around her _except_ General Monroe. It seemed dishonest and cruel to Aster. A false promise of what she _could _do to a man (but never actually would in reality).

But General Monroe seemed to enjoy it, at least to the extent that he said that Aster needed to learn to imitate what Missy was doing, and if that was what was needed to get past the guards, then so be it. There was little other choice. Aster was the only woman there who knew the layout of the Palace and the behavior expected of the _Betties._ Not to mention the only one there, male or female, who had enjoyed the attentions of a dentist any time recently (Trying to pass a woman with rotting teeth off as a _Betty_ would be unlikely to work). And the fact that Aster was larger than any other woman there gave her a slight _advantage_ that General Monroe mentioned once or twice, but that Aster didn't like to think about. She was big enough to survive a hit that would be lethal to a smaller woman. 'Survive' in this case being a euphemistic term to mean that Aster might possibly live long enough after being shot to kill the guards and pull the fuses, before bleeding to death. Or dying later on of infection.

"The best strategy is to _not_ get shot." Wolfkiller told her. General Monroe was having Wolfkiller show Aster the best, fastest ways to take a man out, both with a gun, and with other weapons, including hands and feet. Aster learned quickly, and knew enough about human anatomy that she showed Wolf killer a few things even he hadn't thought of.

"Use surprise, and every dirty trick you can think of." He told her. "Women are not only weaker than men, they're slower. You'll either take out the guards in 5 seconds, or you won't do it at all."

Aster believed the bit about 'weaker', having rather little choice since she _still _couldn't get over that damn wall that was on the Army's training course, but didn't really buy the bit about 'slower', thinking that was just chauvinistic crap, until Wolfkiller told her to block a punch he would aiming at her head. Aster got her arms into the usual bent, defensive position that the former horsemaster had taught her, but didn't even see the punch he threw at her, until it was an inch away from her nose, where it stopped, while Aster blinked crosseyed at the scarred fingers in front of her face. Only then, did she realize the degree to which the former horsemaster had been pulling his blows during their training.

"Like I said," He said in a mild tone. "Slower. I don't know what crap pre-war books or articles you might have read about it, but you are not faster or stronger than most men. Very few women are. Your job is to kill the guards, by whatever dirty trick you have to use, and as fast as you can do it. Not to get in a fight with them, in order to prove you're tougher than them. Because you aren't. You might have been able to take out those three bitches that were giving you a hard time about the soap, but believe me when I tell you that is _nothing_."

Aster nodded. Other than the pre-pubescent boys she had sometimes punched at the zoo for teasing the animals, back when she was a child, she had never taken on a man, one on one before, in a fight. Unless you counted the Maestro's rape of her and he really wasn't a normal man anyways, so didn't really count. It was quite an eye opener, and she paid much closer attention to her lessons in _seduction _after that, despite still finding the entire concept dishonest and cruel. Fighting fair was not part of survival, she decided. She remembered the book _The Call of the Wild_, in which the sled dog, 'Buck' had proven he was fit for survival by stealing fish, and getting another dog blamed for it. No animal, except human beings fighting for amusement rather than survival, ever fought 'fair'. It was hardly 'fair' to a rabbit, for instance, that a lynx like Mr. Stubs had sharp teeth and claws and the rabbit didn't, but the lynx would hardly shrink from using those weapons on the rabbit in order to be 'fair'. Well, so be it. If she were weaker and slower than a man, she would just have to be smarter. She would be _unfair. _She would use seduction, or the darkness, or any other _unfair_ weapon she could think of and use.

After all, the Maestro's gamma given strength was hardly _fair_ either, was it?

Aster was given a set of the green, nearly transparent, silk clothing that the _Betty's_ wore, along with a pair of what had once been the same sort of high-heeled shoes that were available in the palace. The shoes had been modified, the high heels lowered to a bare half inch tall. "Not many women as tall as you." General Monroe told her. "We need to do things to make you look shorter."

The visual tricks to make her look shorter not only included the fake high-heels shoes, but decorations on the dress, as well as on Aster's body. Horizontal lines were added, wherever they could be. A broad sash made of metallic green fabric was tied around the waist of the dress, the loincloth in front was widened slightly. Strings of green beads were sewn in graceful loops across the front of the dress. Aster was given a garters and anklets for her legs, and wide bracelets for her arms.

"We're working on curling the hair on that wig." She was told. "Make that look wider, too."

Eventually, Aster learned to imitate 'Missy' fairly well. To move and act the way the other woman did. Though it was hard to keep herself from sometimes bursting out with laughter. Really, wiggling your hips like that when you walked, so you could only make half the speed you otherwise would have? How the hell could one get anything done? Of course, the Betty's really _hadn't_ gotten a whole lot done, now that she thought about it. Other than sometimes having sex, and even that they had never really actually done most of the time if they could help it. Pretty much everything they had done had merely been looking good and teasing. When it came to anything that really needed doing, like fixing the toilet, it had been Aster who had had to do it. The rest of the _Betty's _had been useless. At least for anything practical. All they could do well, really, was wear clothes and put on makeup. The latter of which Aster also had to be taught to do, by Missy. She would need put it on herself and wear it in the palace.

Aster was given some weapons. Finding a gun for her was difficult. Her hands were larger than most women's, but smaller than most men's. Eventually, she found one she liked, which said 'Taurus' in engraved lettering on the metal. Aster wasn't sure what 'Taurus' meant other than the bull from the zodiac, and a type of a car from before the war that one could sometimes find. Perhaps whatever factory had made the cars before the war had made the guns as well. It was difficult to find a way to hide the gun beneath the rather skimpy outfit Aster needed to wear, but eventually they came up with the idea of making a sort of narrow loincloth out of the same green metallic material her sash was made out of, but only in back. They needed to avoid vertical lines as much as possible in front. A holster was made for her out of braided leather strips, which rubbed uncomfortably on her skin and threatened to cut her if worn for any length of time. Aster rubbed the leather with a bit of grease, which didn't help much, and wore it anyways. It hid the gun well under the metallic sash and loincloth, and she would only need to use it for a little while. Besides which, the holster came off fairly easily, and had a sharp metal circle with spikes at one end. It could be used as a weapon, in and of itself. It was a good thing to have, even if it hurt. She could always bitch about it later.

Which she intended to.

Wolfkiller, who had gained a great deal of skill at blacksmithing from having to make shoes for horses, made her a small curved knife, that could be hidden in the garter she wore on her leg.

"Always have a backup weapon." He told her. "Or three. Especially when you are walking into a trap."

"It's a trap for them, not me." Aster told him.

He just shook his head. "The bars on a cage work both ways."

But having a backup weapon made sense. Aster suggested to General Monroe that they poison a bottle of wine, and if she were lucky, perhaps she could convince the guards to drink it. He considered the idea for a few moments, then shook his head.

"Poison has always been a woman's weapon." He told Aster. "There's a big chance they'll insist you drink first. I don't have any fancy poisons with antidotes. Maybe if that Dr. Llewellyn were here, we could have come up with something. As it is, we need you to look and act like a woman, but fight like a man. The… contradiction might surprise them enough to slow them down. Like Wolfkiller told you, you'll have about five seconds to take them out, if you're going to."

Aster thought about this. "Could a wine bottle itself be a weapon? A club, or breaking it to slash someone with?"

General Monroe thought about this. "Too short to make a good club. You'd have to get close to them, and the Maestro picks larger men to be his guards. But breaking it… a good idea, but not in the time we have. It's tricky to break a bottle, if you don't know exactly how. Especially for … someone who isn't that strong in the arms. And every bottle is different. You could cut yourself in the process."

Aster was annoyed. There had to be a way to use something as large as a wine bottle as a weapon. Or to hide a weapon. She thought about it for a minute, so intent that she missed something else that General Monroe said to her. Inwardly, she was visualizing the entire Consolidated Iron Mines, and everything in it, and all the components that those things were made of. There had to be something she could use. Something. She pictured the storage rooms, and the supplies, and the equipment used, and the things they made, then mentally went through all of them again, in greater detail. There had to be _something _she could use. Something _unfair._

There was.

She opened her half lidded eyes, and asked General Monroe a question. He didn't understand it at first, because she used the technical term for what she needed. She asked him again, using the common name for what she wanted.

"Yeah, we got a fair amount of that. We steal some, make some when we have to. Which isn't easy. But you're right, we do need it, so we have it on hand. Why do you ask?"

Aster told him what she had in mind.

"Nasty." It was a tone of admiration and approval. Probably the most he had approved of her since she had fed him _power_ with her idea about his keeping the cameras and film to take pictures of all the members of the Army. "Very nasty. And very dangerous. How will you protect yourself from it, if you use it?"

Aster had some ideas as to that, as well. General Monroe nodded.

"Brilliant. Nasty, but brilliant. Glad you're on my side, you'd be too dangerous to let live if you were an enemy, you know that?" That was actually a compliment, coming from General Monroe. "You are a monster, you know that? You just might actually pull this off and live. If you do, I'll tell Wolfkiller to promote you."

Aster didn't much care about being 'promoted'. Except that maybe rank could get things done that she needed done, that she couldn't get done otherwise. But again, that hint that he wasn't going to be around much longer. His cancer must have been worse than it seemed. But there was nothing Aster could do about it. She could only do what she could do, which would be - if she were very lucky and smart - to get the lights off in the Maestro's palace so that the rest of the Army could take the place with as few casualties as possible.

"I'll only be able to bring a little with me." Aster said. "In a bottle or something. But bring more, with the Army. As much as you can. It's useful stuff."

"Don't go asking for it." he warned her. "I'll get you the stuff on some pretext or the other. And don't even mention it to _anyone. _I caught one spy, but there could be more."

Aster's other lesson was, as General Monroe had promised, in learning to drive the trucks. She disliked that lesson as much as she did the lessons in seduction, but for different reasons. The seduction she found to be cruel, dishonest, and alien. She found driving the trucks to be purely _frightening._

She didn't know herself, why she was so afraid of the trucks. Part of it was their height. Aster had never liked heights, she had been nervous even riding on Wolfkiller's Percheron's, and the trucks positioned her even higher than that. Then there was the sheer _power_ of the damn things. The trucks could pull as much, or possibly even _more_, than the Maestro could lift. It was because of their _power_ that she needed to be able to drive them. She had envisioned in her mind one possible way, one slim chance, of finally getting her revenge on the Maestro. And the trucks were a part of it. She needed several things done, that only a truck could do. Some of them would need to be done fairly soon, others would not have to be done for a long time (at least if she were lucky). And there was no way to do it with her own weak body. Even a man, or even one of Wolfkiller's draft horses would not be able to do what needed to be done. She needed to be able to control strength close to that of the Maestro himself.

But it was, perhaps, the very strength that she needed, that frightened her. Despite the fact that the truck had no will of it's own, it went exactly where Aster steered it (at least when she didn't stall it out by pressing the clutch and brake in the wrong order), the huge machines reminded her very much of the Maestro. Sitting in them was like sitting in his lap, back when she had been a child, during the feast he threw to celebrate the fact that he was going to rape her nearly to death that night.

Aster did not even know how to drive, which the various men who were teaching her about the truck said was actually a good thing. She had no bad habits to 'unlearn'. But there were many controls in the truck, and the things were finicky. You had to get them up to a certain speed, which you would know either by looking at the 'tachyometer', or preferably, by listening to the sound of the engine. Then it was clutch, and brake, and clutch, and shift, and then accelerate before you stalled out. And then again. Upshift, upshift, upshift. Or in reverse. Downshift, downshift, until it was safe to stop the truck and park it. The transmission in the truck was finicky, as might be expected of a hundred or more year old machine, and Aster had to suffer through often stalling it out, or grinding the gears (and getting subsequently chewed out by whoever was teaching her at the moment) before she learned the particular quirks of the machine well enough to successfully shift it at least 90% of the time.

After a few days of lessons, Aster got the truck up to a speed where it wasn't safe to go in the small circles that there was room for in the cleared area in front of the mines, and the various men who were teaching her had her drive up and down the muddy, icy trail leading to the mines, threatening her with dire consequences if she 'skidded on the mud and sent the truck into the ditch'. She didn't send the truck into the ditch, but there were only a few miles of trail they were allowed to go on. The end of the trail was roped and flagged off, and there were several guards there. Nobody was allowed to leave the Underworld without permission, and it had been in attempting to leave without permission that the spy that General Monroe had hung had been caught. Aster asked General Monroe once about the location of the guard post and was just answered with a shrug. She knew him better than to press the matter. Probably there was a Reason, but she did not Need To Know. Her best guess was that the metal in the hills around the mines interfered with radio transmission, but that once one got past the point where the guards were, radio transmission would be possible again, and a spy who got past that point could possibly contact the Maestro by that means and betray them. Their belongings had been searched, and any radio transmitters or objects that even looked like they could either have hidden transmitters or be modified to be transmitters had been taken. But that meant little. There was a lot of wilderness around the mines, and a spy could have hidden a radio a few miles away, and it would be unlikely to be found by anyone who didn't know where it was.

Since Aster did not want to be hung, and there was plenty of trail to practice driving on, she always stopped when she got to the guard post. Occassionally, she would get out to get a drink of water from the barrel they had, or use the crude pit toilet. Once the guards told her to bring them 'some beer and bread'. The guards were not allowed to drink on duty. General Monroe was actually far more strict when it came to that sort of disciplinary point than the Maestro had been. However, Aster got out of the truck when she drove back to the mines, managed to beg for a loaf of bread and a few apples from the kitchen staff, and brought those to the guards on her next trip down the trail. They seemed grateful for them, but teased her a little that she 'hadn't brought any beer'. At least Aster thought it was teasing, it was often hard for her to tell whether people were joking with her or not.

Most of her instructors with the truck did not notice how afraid Aster was of the huge, Maestro-like machines. She was that good at hiding her fear and functioning in spite of it. The few who did notice, merely thought Aster was 'a little nervous', and reassured her that she would 'get over it'. One older man thought that Aster's nervousness was due to the fact that everyone who would be driving the trucks would take a large hit of radiation, and suggested that she ought to leave it to those who were 'so old they would die soon anyways.'. But it wasn't the thought of the radiation that was scaring Aster, it was the trucks themselves; and she simply told the man that General Monroe had promised her her own truck, and she was going to get one, and if the old man didn't bloody well like it, he could just go complain to General Monroe.

The old man did not care to do that, so simply muttered some rude words under his breath, and kept giving Aster her lesson.

The one man who did notice Aster's fear of the trucks was Wolfkiller. He occasionally was the one giving Aster her driving lessons, and it was one day, after Aster had been learning to use the trucks for three weeks, that Wolfkiller noticed her slight gasp when she ground the gears again, reached across the cab of the truck. He noticed the way she was gripping the wheel with white knuckled hands, and holding her body stiffly, as if she thought she were made out of glass and likely to shatter at the slightest blow. _Not good_, he thought, and put his hand on the side of her throat. Aster pulled away from the unwanted contact with a man.

"What are you doing?" She said angrily. She might have to put up with that sort of thing during her _seduction _lessons with General Monroe, but she would be damned if she had to put up with it any other time.

But the brief contact had been enough for the former horsemaster to tell that Aster's pulse was racing. Probably at least 160, or twice as fast as it should have been, while just sitting. And he knew enough about panicked horses to be able to recognize a panicked horse, or a panicked Aster, when he saw one, no matter how well she disguised it.

"You're terrified!" He said. "Your heart rate is through the roof. What are you scared of? The truck? You've been driving it for nearly a month. You ought to be used to it by now. What's wrong with you?"

"I don't know." Aster couldn't put it into words. Most of her fear was below her level of consciousness. "The trucks are just scary."

The large man shook his head. "Why are you doing this? You don't need to. We got plenty of drivers. Forget about this, and ride in the back with everyone else. It's safer, anyways. There's no way to shield the cabs from radiation."

Aster did not mention that she thought there was a way to shield everyone, even the drivers, from the radiation. She wasn't sure if what she thought was correct, and wouldn't give anyone false hopes. And it wasn't the radiation that was frightening her.

"I do need to do it." She told Wolfkiller.

"Why?" he demanded. "Why do you want this so badly when it's obviously scaring the hell out of you?"

But Aster was not about to tell him that. "I just do."

Daniel Wolfkiller shook his head and said nothing. He finished her driving lesson for the day, then after the truck was parked, went to see Erick Monroe.

"I don't like this notion of teaching Aster to drive a truck." He complained to the General. "I want you to order her to give up on the idea."

"I'm sorry, I really can't do that." The older man did not sound sorry at all.

"You're in charge here, you can do whatever the hell you want!"

"Actually, no, I can't." General Monroe's guts were paining him worse than usual that afternoon, and he sat down and rubbed his side. "I can't force a few hundred people to fight for me, unless they're willing to do so. And I can't force Aster Aversa to break into the palace, kill two guards, and pull the damn fuses, unless SHE wants to do so. Her price is a truck. So be it. I'll give it to her. We've got plenty of other trucks. We don't have another woman who knows the palace and the protocol like she does."

"Well, I don't like it." Wolfkiller groused. "She didn't ask for this truck on a lark. In fact, she's terrified of the damn thing. Terrified, and learning to drive it anyways. She wants it for a Reason, I'm damned sure of that, and she refuses to tell me _why_ she wants it. And I don't like that."

"You don't need to like it." General Monroe pointed out. "You just need to follow orders and teach her."

"So, you don't even care why she wants a truck?" He folded his arms in disgust.

"Oh, I care." General Monroe said. "Or at least I'm curious. I'll be watching from hell, if I'm able, to see what she has planned for it. But trust me when I say it's pretty low down on my list of priorities. I'm fairly sure she doesn't want it for any reason that's a threat to me or my children, which is about the only thing that _might_ slightly worry me. As for whatever other insane reason she might have in that twisted little head of hers for wanting the truck, I honestly don't give a damn. For all I know, she's horny for the damn thing, and fat lot I care if she puts on a public _tomato show" _he used a current slang term for a live sex show, "with the damn thing, if that's what it takes to get her to get those damn fucking lights out."

"Do you care that she's scared out of her head?"Wolfkiller said. "She's more scared of that truck than she is of breaking into the palace. That's not sane. It's a damn machine. She shouldn't be scared. At least, not that scared."

"We're all afraid." said General Monroe. "She's not special in that regard."

Wolfkiller shook his head. He lacked the language ability to adequately express the sheer terror that he could see in Aster. "Nobody should be that afraid. They shouldn't be that afraid, and they shouldn't be able to work, despite that much fear. It just makes me wonder, just how much has she been through, in the Maestro's palace, to have had to learn to live with that much fear. It isn't right. She's just a kid."

"A kid…" General Monroe drummed his fingers. "She's twenty years old, Daniel. Or is it nineteen? No matter. She's not a kid. Most women her age are married and have a kid or two of their own. Stop picturing her as the girl she was, back in that Zoo she lived in. Because from what you told me, that girl died when she was 14 years old. When the Maestro put her in a cage like an animal, and raped her. What's left… well, it's not what she would have been. I'd almost use the word _undead, _like _Vampires _like this Morbius are supposed to be. She shouldn't have survived what happened, and what did survive isn't human any more at all. I won't lie. I don't feel sorry for her. Ten years ago, I probably would have raped her myself."

"Well, things change. A General can't really get away with that like a bandit can. You told me that once, and I'm starting to see it for myself. It's going to take an army to save Evan and Gina, to get them somewhere safe, so I have to be a leader, not a criminal. In fact, more than an army. A nation, probably, but I won't live to found it. Probably you will. Possibly that freak Aster might, and that will be really interesting." His face wrinkled. "It sucks. I'm not cut out for this, but if I don't keep them safe, who will? Nobody. It sucks for me, I'd rather be spending my last days eating and drinking than trying to organize these people. It sucks for you. It sucks for Aster, after what happened to her, I doubt anything but death is going to put an end to fear in her. Well, there's nothing I can do to help her, or myself. The only thing I can do, is make things better for Evan and Gina. And the other kids here."

The last sentence was an obvious afterthought. A man like Monroe cared about little except himself and his own family. "Give them a better life and a better future than you or I or that little Zookeeping bitch have. If I have to hurt and frighten her more than she's already been through, to get that done, then so be it."

"Besides," A good leader always held out a carrot. "She's got a fair chance. She came up with a damn good idea about taking out the guards. She might survive. Even the radiation. She's young enough to take a big hit, and she has a good point about there likely being a cure for it, where you're going. _Something_ is keeping all the people and plants there alive, at any rate. If she does make it, maybe she'll find a life for herself, in this Wisconsin place. Time doesn't always heal wounds, not ones as bad as we have, but it does sometimes scar them over so it doesn't hurt quite so badly."

Eventually, things came together. Aster learned to imitate the seduction other women seemed to know by instinct well enough to please General Monroe. She learned to drive the truck better than most men, though she was never comfortable in it. She was a good shot with the gun, and knew a few good, deadly blows with both her hands, and her little curved knife. Like everyone else in the army, she was good at finding her way even in total darkness. She was tired and hungry all the time, but so was everyone else in the Army of Darkness. Given the amount of training they had to do, none of them could get as much sleep as they ought to have gotten. It made them hate their enemy, the Maestro and his pampered guards worse than ever. After all, it was _the enemy's _fault that they had been driven to such a desperate course of action. General Monroe reminded them of that fact at least several times a day.

On the last day of March, when the winter snows and ice had melted into cold mud, except for a few lingering piles where snow had been plowed off the clearing in front of the mines where they had all trained, General Monroe assembled everyone in the Army of Darkness to stand before him. He was up on his usual wooden platform, and they were all in rows. The sun had gone down an hour earlier, and the only light was from a tall torch standing next to the General himself, and a cooking fire off to one side of the assembled soldiers that had been used earlier in the day, and was now nothing but dim coals. There were several dozen practice dummies set into the ground about 100 feet away on the left, and numerous barrels behind them. He said nothing for a few minutes, and Aster wondered what was up, as most of the other people probably were. Usually, they were given their orders for exercises almost immediately, and in a rude tone of voice.

Finally, their General spoke.

"Soldiers!" He told them, and everyone straightened. "Left Face! Assemble your positions!"

Aster moved with the rest of the soldiers Everyone moved quickly, into a shallow, U shaped formation, pointed towards the dummies like a wide, gaping jaw. Men in the front and center, women and children to either side, and forward just slightly, at least for their starting positions. That would change. The only light was from the dim coals and the torch next to General Monroe, but they did not need more light than that. They were the Army of Darkness, and they had been trained to fight in the dark. And they _knew_ who the enemy was. It was the green clad dummies. Nobody in the Army ever wore green. It was not forbidden, but none of them would ever wear it, nevertheless. Green was the color of their enemy.

"Guns! Attack the enemy!" Monroe ordered. The men dropped to one knee, and the women and teenagers between the ages of 12 and 16 crouched behind them. The men and women had larger rifles and pistols, the smaller teenagers had mostly what General Monroe called 'Twenty-twos'. They all shot at the dummies, using hand loaded low powered rounds that did not make nearly as much noise as the regular ammunition that was used in the soundproofed target range inside the mines. It was still loud, but not so loud that it could be heard miles away, by someone who might report the shooting to the Maestro.

The women and teenagers, partly shielded by the kneeling men, fired over the heads and shoulders of the shooting men. Shreds of cloth, chips of wood, and clumps of hay flew off the dummies. Aster was shooting as well, in an uncomfortable crouching position. Being taller than most of the other women, she had to get lower, in order to use the men in front of her as sheilds.

"Forward!" They were ordered, and the men got from their knees to a crouching position, scurrying forwards, the women and teenagers at full height behind them, still shooting at the dummies.

"Cease fire!" Came a loud order. Then, another command. "Hand weapons! Women and children on Arrows and Slings! You men on Spears and Axes! Cease ranged fire when the men are within 20 feet of the enemy.

This was necessary, and they had been trained for it. They had a lot of ammunition, but did not know how much they would need to use when they attacked the Maestro's palace, and they could not break off the attack if they ran out. The women and children rained rocks and arrows at the dummies, as the men ran forward with spears. Once they had used the spears, they would switch to axes. Aster was using a bow. She had the size and strength for it. About 2/3 of the other women, the stronger ones, as well as some of the stronger teenagers were using bows as well. The smaller and weaker women and teenagers were slingers, using the whirling motion to get the range and speed they would not have had with a light bow. And the combination of both arrows and rocks would hopefully be more confusing to their enemy than arrows alone.

The men got close enough to the dummies that it was no longer safe to fire the slings and bows over their heads, and General Monroe ordered: "Bows and slings! Cease forward fire! Defend the perimeter!"

Aster and the other women and the teenagers looked right and left, and sure enough, large stuffed sacks on the ends of ropes were arcing through the air, to both sides, or being pulled along the ground. They rained arrows and rocks on them, protecting the men and their army from a side attack. It wasn't easy to hit a moving target, but they had learned to do it in three months of hard training, and most of the archers and slingers hit their mark. There were large crates and barrels set around. These were 'cover' and now that they were no longer directly behind the men, they hid and fired from behind them, whenever they could, darting from one piece of 'cover' to another, to get closer to their 'enemy'.

The men, meanwhile, had impaled the dummies with spears, and were in the process of hacking them up with axes and the short, wide swords that General Monroe called a 'Gladius'. Aster was one of the few people in the Army who knew that a 'Gladius' was the standard weapon for Roman soldiers, who had lived over 2000 years ago, when Jesus had supposedly been alive. She had mentioned it to a few other soldiers who were interested, but most of them didn't care. It cut through the enemy like a knife through soft cheese, and that was all they cared about. Aster did not have a Gladius, which made her a bit jealous. She and the other women and teenagers had thinner swords, dirks, that were about the same length as the gladius, but much lighter. And they had not been trained in them all that much. General Monroe said they would be more useful with bows and slings than they would in hand to hand combat. Which was probably true. The advantage in close combat was almost always to whoever was bigger and stronger. Besides, General Monroe wanted to protect his _Seed Corn_ as much as was possible in the battle.

"Cease fire!" General Monroe ordered again. A second later, there was silence, then in a few moments, a loud clatter. Barrels were being rolled at them from several directions, down the incline of the large hills the mines were dug into. In the darkness, Aster did not see who was rolling the barrels, but assumed they were high enough on the hills that they were not likely to be hit by what came next.

"Wardogs!" came a cry from General Monroe. "Attack!"

He did not tell them HOW to attack, but by this time, they knew their stuff. They charged forward, and there was shooting with guns, bows, and slings. Then, as the army and barrels got close to one another, the men switched to spears, axes, and the gladius, smashing and hacking the main group of wooden barrels that were directly in front of them, while the women and teenagers shot arrows and stones at those 'wardog' barrels that were on one side.

There was a sudden squealing. A few dozen pigs, who had been in the mines, had apparently been brought onto the hills along with the barrels, and were now being released, and driven down the hill.

"More Wardogs!" came the cry. There was only a moment's hesitation about it now being a _living_ enemy, then like the barrels and dummies before them, the frantic pigs were subjected to bullets, and arrows, and stones, and the hacking and stabbing of edged weapons. The pigs squealed frantically, and a few tried to charge the army, or run back up the hills they had come from, but there was simply too much death raining down on them from too many directions. Not one of them escaped.

In only a few minutes, the barrels and pigs stopped. Whoever was rolling them down the hills had obvious run out of them. There was silence, and they regarded the devastation before them. What had been carefully constructed stuffed dummies and barrels, was now little more than scraps and splinters and tufts of trampled straw. The pigs were crudely butchered corpses, surrounded by blood, and hacked off limbs and bits of flesh. Mud and blood covered everything, especially the members of the Army of Darkness. A few members of the Army were bleeding, from falls and one had an arrow stuck in his leg and was lying on one side being treated by one of the Army's medics. The clearing and all the objects in it looked like it had been demolished by some terrifying monster of inhuman strength and fury, a monster worse than the Maestro himself. Aster and all the other soldiers were panting and trying to catch their breath and slow their hearts.

There was pig blood around Aster's mouth. Or perhaps it was human blood, from one of the other soldiers, or even herself. She tasted it with her tongue, but got no clue as to it's source. She put her tongue back into her mouth. The taste of blood was strangely good, after their battle, but pigs were dirty animals, almost as disgusting as the Maestro himself, and raw pig blood could carry nasty parasites. Human blood would actually be better. Aster tasted the blood a moment more, then spat the stuff back out onto the ground, just in case it _was _pig blood. She shook out her arms, unsure what to do next. Nobody else seemed to know, either. General Monroe let them wait for several calculated seconds, then stepped onto the battlefield, carrying his torch with him, and regarded the utter devastation.

"You have done well." He finally said. "Three months ago, you were all helpless recruits, running away for your very lives! Now you are soldiers, you will turn around and destroy the bastards who drove you from your homes and lives! The bastards who have been taking the best of your food, and women, and children for that Green Devil! You'll kill them, and take back from them what you stole, take from them what you need not only to survive, but to create a new nation! A nation where our children will be safe from the Maestro, that Green Devil! And their children, or grandchildren, God willing, may someday rise against him! And throw the raping, child eating devil back in the Hell where he belongs!"

The cheers were deafening. They only got to cheer for about ten seconds, however, when General Monroe raised his arm, calling for silence.

"You have all _earned_ your place in the Army of Darkness!" he told them. "You will be given the uniforms you have earned! Line up in parade positions!"

That meant - line up by gender, age, and height. Men first, then women, then the teenagers between twelve and sixteen who were fighting. Aster was a bit of an incongruity in the line, taller than the shortest man who was standing directly in front of her, but noticeably taller than the next tallest woman, directly behind her. As they waited while a few men brought out some rough tables and boxes and bags of the 'uniforms', Aster glanced backwards and noticed the on other person who stuck out so awkwardly, a gangly teenage boy, over a foot taller than the short woman who was ahead of his. He noticed Aster glancing at him, and shrugged sheepishly. He was actually taller than Aster; the difference in height between him and the woman ahead of him was much greater than the difference in height between Aster and either the woman behind her, or the man ahead of her. But the boy behind him, at least, was not that much shorter than he was. Aster stuck out oddly no matter which way you looked in the line.

Nobody really cared, though. They were all too eager to get their uniforms. Which consisted of a cloak and an iron pin that could either fasten it shut, or be used as an ornament. Both had been made, in secret, during the past three months, by some of the very old men and women in the Underworld. They were too old to be part of the Army of Darkness, too old to fight, but they could still sew and do metalwork. And it actually had not been all that much of a 'secret' as to what they had been doing, but by collective tacit agreement, everyone in the Army pretended that it was.

The cloak had slits for their arms, was made of warm wool, and colored a dark, nearly black, grey, with a hind of mottling. It had a hood that could be pulled to cover nearly all of their face, or folded over to cover just the head, and was cut and hemmed in a scalloped fashion on the bottom like a bat's wings. Indeed, if they held it up (which the first few men to get their cloaks were gleefully doing) it made them look very much like giant bats. Aster approved of the dark grey color. Night was only very rarely a dead, pitch black. There was almost always _some_ small amount of light, from the moon, or stars, or fires, or even the air itself (odd as that seemed). A true, jet black color would have been more noticeable than the dark grey.

The metal pins were in three styles. One was shaped like a bat, with outstretched wings. The second was shaped like the crescent moon. The last was shaped like a star. The bat pins were for the men, the moons for the women, the stars for the teenagers between twelve and sixteen. Except when Aster reached the tables where they were being handed out, and the man behind the table tried to hand her a moon pin, she shook her head.

"I want a bat pin." There were still some left in the box. And bats, especially _Vampire_ bats were predators. They attacked, like she was going to have to do in the palace. They didn't just sit there and look pretty like the moon. Or like the _Betties_ in the palace did. And it was the only one that was an animal. Appropriate for a Zookeeper.

"Bats are for men, moons are for women." The man behind the table said absently, as if it were a line he had memorized by rote, without knowing or caring about it's meaning.

But Aster could be stubborn. She slung the cloak she had just gotten (a size 'extra large') over her shoulder, and squinted and glared at the man. How dare he tell her what pin she could and couldn't have, when she was the one who was going to have to risk herself in such a dangerous and repugnant way to try and get the lights out in the Maestro's palace in order to reduce the danger for all the rest of the Army. But she could not tell the man that that is what she was going to do. General Monroe had warned her not to talk about what he wanted her to do, lest there be another spy (or three) in the Underworld, who might warn the Maestro of it. So she just glared at him, and snatched a bat pin out of the box anyways. Stealing it, like she had stolen the bottle from Daniel Wolfkiller so long ago. She may not have deserved the bottle, that had been a childish, little kid thing to do, but she damn sure had earned that bat.

"I want a bat pin." She told him, holding the pin firmly in her dirty fist. "And I'm going to bloody well have one. You don't like it, why don't you just go crying to Mommy Monroe?"

The man apparently did not want to go crying, either to his 'mommy', or to General Monroe, or both. He looked around in confusion, but nobody else behind the tables or in front of them seemed to care that Aster had taken the wrong pin for her gender. Finally he shrugged, and decided to ignore the matter. He turned to the next person in line, the woman behind Aster, and handed her a moon pin. The second tallest woman in the army didn't care about getting a moon pin, and the line went on.

After about an hour, everyone in the Army of Darkness had their uniforms and was wearing them. Aster was especially impressed by the pins (whether they were bats or moons). They looked to her like real, solid silver. Not iron like she had thought at first. Classy. It impressed everyone else in the Army as well, once it was known. Apparently General Monroe had given up a fair amount of the coins he had obtained during his nefarious past as a bandit chieftain. A few people noticed that Aster had the 'wrong' pin for her gender, and teased her a little about that, and there were a few jokes as to whether certain men who were known to be into buggery ought not to be given a moon pin. But nobody really cared. They were all part of the Army of Darkness, and male or female, into buggery or worse things, that was all that mattered at the moment.

During the chaos of getting their uniforms, and the subsequent mutual admiration, a tall object, nearly ten feet tall, and covered with a sheet, had been brought out, and put down below the platform, near the dim coals in the cooking pit. Aster did not notice it until General Monroe tossed a glass of something, probably the wood alcohol that was in such common use in the Underworld for so many purposes, into the fire pit, and flames shot up, illuminating himself and the large object towering next to him. Everyone else was looking at the sudden, rude flash of firelight as well, and when he had their attention, General Monroe pulled the sheet off the object next to him.

It was the Maestro!

There was a gasp of horror.

Then realization.

It was, of course, not the Maestro himself, but another dummy. This one, just larger and better made than the others. Logs had been carefully sculpted and put together, probably by whoever had made the ornately carved chair of new wood that Aster had noticed in General Monroe's chambers. The work done in actual secret, unlike the pretend 'secret' work of the old men and women who had made their uniforms. Then, painted bright green, given hair of wool and eyes of glass, and dressed in royal clothing, purple and gold, much like the Maestro wore.

No, exactly like he wore.

"And this is our enemy!" General Monroe said. "The green devil himself, who has taken all the good from us! Taken the food from our mouths, and our women to be raped and our children to be roasted like a pig for his table! The enemy that our Army, the Army of Darkness, will take back our lives from and the enemy that the nation we will found, the nation of _Monrovia_, will someday rise against, and destroy! And what does our enemy deserve?"

"DEATH!" was the unanimous answer, shouted in hundreds of voices.

"Then give it to him! Give him death, and roast the bomb making devil in the fires of his own hell!"

It took only a few moments for the members of the army to seize up weapons. The dirk and gladius and spear and especially the axes, whenever they could be found. A furious mob rushed the image of their enemy, and it was toppled, and dismembered, and if there had been entrails inside the wood, they would have been torn out and trampled into the mud as well. The fine clothes were ripped to shreds, the expensive bits of silk and metal being held aloft as prizes by those who had been robbed for far too long. The pieces of wooden limbs were thrown onto the flaring coals, and eventually, two men seized the head, which had had the eyes torn out (the green glass orbs also held aloft as trophies by the two soldiers lucky enough to get them), and amid cheers even louder than before, the head itself was thrown into the flames!

"Take the meat, the meat you killed and earned, and eat it!" General Monroe told them. "Our enemies have fattened themselves long enough, while we starved! Now, we will feast on what we take back from them!"

He pointed behind them, and they saw that the pigs they had killed an hour before had been gutted and laid out, poles skewering them. The axes were brought out again, making frameworks to put the poles on, and chopping more wood for the fire. Large shards of the remains of the barrels, the 'Wardogs' they had destroyed, were thrown along the remains of the ruined effigy of the 'Maestro', bringing more cheers, and making the fire larger yet.

Soon, the pork was cooked, and the roasted pigs were chopped apart with swords, or even ripped from the bones with the bare hands of the starving and furious. Grease and blood spattered their bodies and their new uniforms, but no-one cared. It was the blood of the enemy. Soon, more blood would be joining it.

For some reason, the green glass eyes (or perhaps they were even gems) that had been in the head of the wooden 'Maestro' had attracted the attention of a few women in the Army, and the two men lucky enough to have gouged them out were enjoying their attentions. Eventually, both of them, along with the women, went off into the shadows several feet away, bringing large chunks of roasted meat with them. They weren't entirely out of sight, and although actual sex was forbidden (lest it create a deformed infant) until a month after they had successfully made it through the radiation, the women were doing rather creative and obscene things to the men with their hands and their mouths. Aster glanced at it for a moment, but didn't really care. She had seen far more blatant and obscene orgies in the Maestro's palace, and at least this one was not done for the amusement of a monster who thought it funny to see people degrading themselves. The sight and thought of what was going on did make her slightly aroused, but she didn't join in. The Maestro had ruined her for men, and she wouldn't offer what she couldn't deliver. Besides, the men in the Army didn't really seem her type, or good enough for her. Wolfkiller was sort of interesting, as tall as he was, but she really didn't like him. Or did she. She shook her head. She had had two or three glasses of the strong wine that was being poured around, and wasn't thinking straight. Or perhaps it was actually apple brandy. The stuff was strong, and they had the distilling apparatus, that they used to make the wood alcohol to run the trucks.

One of the women came out of the shadows, after a while, holding a green glass eye above her head. There were cheers, then she looked a bit embarrassed and ran back and returned it to the man it belonged to. Aster didn't care to participate in that sort of celebration, but there was plenty of pork, and tart baked apples, and cold water and even a small cup of wine for everyone. Or four cups. How many had she had, anyways. Maybe she needed another.

She thought drunkenly about the name General Monroe had given to the nation her proposed. _Monrovia_. What an ego! Not only to name it after himself, but to completely ignore the fact that the people who already lived in Wisconsin no doubt had their own names for the places where they lived. Typical of a man like Monroe, who would be _King_, and who wanted to found a dynasty. But it really didn't matter. Let the place be called what Monroe wanted it to be called, if there were a way to get the name to stick. Let it be called Purple Pickle Land, for all she cared. The important thing was, that she was not going to let the character of the land be what Monroe likely wanted. Nor would his children, Evan and Gina, be the tyrants he no doubt wanted them to be. Not if she had anything to say about it. And she didn't have cancer, like Monroe did. Despite the danger of the mission she was going on, she had far more chance of surviving to see the new land and shaping it's character than General Monroe did.

Even if she didn't survive her mission (and that was also possible, though she didn't like to think of it), she didn't think that the new land would have the sort of character General Monroe might want it to have. There would be all the people in Wisconsin, who no doubt greatly outnumbered them, who would have their own way of doing things. And even if you discounted them (which you couldn't, really), it was rather doubtful to Aster if even the other members of the Army of Darkness would go for such a thing. The Army might have been made by General Monroe. And he was a very bad man. But despite that, the Army and the people in it were bigger and better than Monroe himself was. _More_ than he was. He had, though no doubt unintentionally, surpassed himself in the thing he had created. It was actually rather funny, if you thought about it, and Aster snickered and stuck out her tongue briefly in the General's direction. Though she was careful to hide it behind her hand. An idea, of sorts, formed in her head.

During the celebration, General Monroe sat on a chair on his platform, at one point accepting one of the Army cloaks that someone brought him and placed over his shoulders. It was a cold night, and the cancer did not help his circulation. His limbs often tended to go numb. He regarded the bacchanal destruction and celebration in front of him impassively. Daniel Wolfkiller went up by him.

"So… what do you think of our Army?" General Monroe asked the former horsemaster."

Wolfkiller looked at the same scene, and shook his head. Even Aster, who normally was very straightlaced, was slightly drunk, and her face and hair covered with blood and mud and bits of meat and grease. "Monsters. That's what they are. Monsters."

"Good." The general nodded. "We're robbing one monster, and going straight into the den of another one. If the Zookeeper lives, and has her way, we might be able to tame the second monster. Though more likely we'll have to kill him. But the monster - the devil - here will definitely have to die someday. And it will take monsters to do it. Monsters to kill the devil."

There were screams, and someone poured a bucket of alcohol onto the fire, making the flames flare almost ten feet high, higher than the effigy of the Maestro had been, and singe the roasting pigs. It was Aster. Who knew how she had gotten into the store of alcohol, but trust her to find trouble, or to make it. Though judging from the cheers, it was trouble that everyone else highly approved of. There were cries of death, damnation, and roasting in Hell to the Maestro from most of those nearby, and more meat was seized and devoured.

A few minutes passed, and there was a sudden rumbling. The celebrants looked up, and saw that one of the trucks was approaching. There was a brief panic, but then it swung to one side, away from them. Headlights flashed, the horn honked, and then the truck crashed at a veering angle into the wooden wall that was on the training course they had all used. It fell over, of course, no match for the weight and sheer power of the trailer. The truck stopped, the engine shut off, and a few members of the Army approached cautiously, weapons in hand.

Aster got out, dangling the keys triumphantly. The headlights of the truck were still on, and she leaped onto the remains of the wall and did a rather drunken jig.

"Only woman in the whole Army to get over that damn wall!" She pumped her fist in the air. "Now what do you all say to that?!"

There were more cheers, and several people climbed onto the top of the truck to enjoy drinking from a higher vantage point. The wall itself, which had broken when Aster drove the truck over it, was torn apart with axes, and the boards added gleefully to the fire.

"She is a monster, our little Aster." General Monroe decided. Aster looked happier and more confident than she had in all the months he had known her. Had it only been three months? It seemed longer. He smiled grimly. "A little monster. Your Doctor Llewellyn was right about that. And not only her, all of them are monsters. _My_ monsters."

He didn't stand up, but the expression on his face was as proud as if he had been standing at full height. He thought about the Army he had made, a wave of human destruction, rising up like a sword and a shield to protect his children, his only future, from that green devil. And if the monster in Wisconsin, the _Vampire, _could be tamed, and used to protect them, all the better. He was a bad man, and had spent his life doing bad things, but this, perhaps, he had finally done right.

"Monsters." He said with emphasis. "I'll play these. And give them damn good odds. Because they're _my monsters."_


	28. Chapter 28

Chapter 28. Exodus

For the next day, everyone in the Army of Darkness was busy loading the trucks. They wanted to take everything with them, but there was not room, and there were things they would need to get at the Maestro's palace to take with them. If the attack were successful. And there was a good chance it would be. A single scout on horse had confirmed that the Maestro, despite the worsening of his insanity, had indeed left on his seasonal trip to collect taxes, food, women, and anything else that took his fancy.

It had already been thought out and discussed several times in the past few months, what they would need to bring along from the caves, what would have to be left behind, and what would have to be destroyed, lest their enemies gain from finding it. There were good reasons for what they did, but the actual doing of it, now that the time had finally come, was still sad.

Most of the animals had to be left behind. The pigs had been slaughtered and eaten the previous night, precisely because there was not room for them. Aster had found out from the Millers and the other people from Wisconsin what sort of livestock they had. Most of it was much like what the people in New York had, but there were differences. Some sort of plague had killed most of the chickens, shortly after the war, and they were still scarce. Whatever plague had killed them was still around, and there were frequent outbreaks of it. They used ducks for eggs. They had cattle, but also a sort of very large goat called a 'Gruff'. It was good for milk, and light draft work.

Then there were Daniel Wolfkiller's horses, and a few chickens. The hybrid Percherons were large, according to the people from Wisconsin, larger than most of the horses there. And a large horse could save a man a _lot _of work. Aster recommended taking as many horses as possible, as well as the few pets people had, but leaving the chickens. Whatever plague was killing the chickens in Wisconsin would no doubt kill unexposed chickens even faster. Most of the chickens were killed and stewed for their meals that day. The rest were let go to fend for themselves. Aster doubted if they would survive.

Hay and grain and the best of the horses were loaded into the truck. The remaining horses were also let go. Aster gave them a better chance than the chickens, they could tolerate the cold better, and there was more forage for them than for the poultry. There were a few goats, as well, but after Aster and Daniel Wolfkiller discussed the subject of goats at length with the people from Wisconsin, they had decided to free the goats as well. The goats they had did not sound as if they produced more milk, or more wool, or more meat than those in Wisconsin. They could get new goats there, if they wanted, and in the meantime, they had only a limited amount of space. Besides, the 'Gruffs' sounded interesting.

The only mule they had was suffering from an infected hoof. Daniel Wolfkiller shot it with his rifle, bringing several boos and hisses that he ignored. A few members of the Army suggested salting down the mule meat, but were also booed and hissed at. They had full stomachs from the chicken, and there would be plenty of meat to steal from the Maestro's palace. And other food as well. The soldiers in the Army of Darkness tried to alleviate the anxiety of the imminent battle by discussing what sorts of foods were stored away there. Aster, as one the only one other than Daniel Wolfkiller who had firsthand knowledge of the matter, was questions several times, but the answers she gave were quickly exaggerated by the hungry people, so that her reports of pies a foot or so across became, after a few tellings, tall tales of pies so large that the Maestro himself could have been baked inside one.

They had no cattle. Cattle were highly prized by Maestro, who (before his tastes had turned to human flesh) had been a glutton for steaks, roast beef, milk, and cheese, whenever he could get it. Stealing cattle would have been too risky.

There was little other food, save for several sacks of dried beans. They were all thoroughly sick of beans by this time, but they packed them. They were good, non-perishable protein. They would need them. Then, since the animals had been taken care of, they began packing all their non-living goods. Clothing. Fabric. There was not much of that. What books they had, and a few pieces of jewelry, much of it broken.

Then they began packing tools. The tools had been the subject of the most lengthy discussions, over the past few months. They had some power tools, and a large assortment of hand tools. The power tools were of dubious value. They required electricity. They had run them off the truck engines, while in the Underworld, but someday in the future the truck engines would wear out, and they might not be able to repair them. They certainly had no way of making more. The people in Wisconsin were strangely evasive, and gave contradictory stories as to whether or not there was any electricity available where they had come from, and how reliable it was. During one such discussion with Dave Miller, Aster had finally gotten disgusted and told him that it was obvious that his children (meaning Patricia) had gotten what few brains they had from their mother, and that she was going to find out what the power situation was in Wisconsin sooner or later, and that if he knew what was good for him, he would make it sooner.

All that this temper tantrum got her was the older man screaming at her that she was a 'bloody murderer' and he came at her with his fists, until she gave him a solid thump in the stomach with her staff. This had resulted in both of them getting tossed out of the meeting by General Monroe and Dave Miller had been sent to wash dishes with the old women while Aster had been sent to clean the Army pit toilets. She didn't care. The work gave her time to contemplate just what sort of guilty secret the people from Wisconsin were hiding.

In the end, they brought all of the hand tools and most of the power tools. Aster had taken several of the latter apart, and decided that even if there was no electricity at all in Wisconsin, they could probably be adapted for use without electricity, by putting them on a hand crank, or running a belt to some sort of pedals. They had to be of some use. Daniel Wolfkiller and a few other men were fair blacksmiths and could make a pretty fair steel, but nothing like what had been made before the War.

There were a few 'tanker' trucks, filled with the alcohol that fueled all the trucks. Then a few 'flatbeds' with rusty bulldozers on top. Dave Miller and the other people from Wisconsin, although they were strangely reluctant to talk about conditions in their home state, had no such reticence in discussing the conditions of the roads between Milwaukee and Dystopia. And the conditions were not good. There were very few inhabitants in the radioactive wastelands, and most of them had more important concerns than maintaining roads for vehicles that were rare relics from the pre-War days, and that for the most part they did not own themselves. A century of time had not been kind to what had once been a cross-country highway system. The roads were crumbling in many places, bridges were collapsed, and in places were blocked by rocks, trees, and abandoned vehicles. The Wisconsonites had for the most part driven around these obstacles in some fashion, but they had come in vans and had had an immunity to radiation at the time. The trucks that they were now using were far larger and less maneuverable, and they didn't want to spend any more time in the radiation than they had to. Any impassable roads would be _made_ passable, and any blocked roads would be _unblocked. _And that would be done as forcibly and quickly as possible. And heaven help anyone who tried to stop them.

Aster did not mention the notion she had for protecting even the truck drivers from the radiation. She wasn't sure she would be able to find what she needed, or if it even existed, and did not want to give them false hopes.

And of course, there was Aster's truck. Mostly empty for now, except for some battered, pre-war '55 gallon' barrels. That would, she hoped, soon change. There were a great many things she needed to get from the Maestro's palace when they conquered it.

If they conquered it. No, she mustn't think negatively. She needed to assume they would succeed.

For now, other than the barrels, all her truck contained was a small chest of her belongings, set next to a bad smelling mattress that was behind the seat. It had her clothes, a few tattered books, the picture of her family. The costume and makeup she would wear to disguise herself as a _Betty _to sneak into the castle. The gun and knife. And a bottle. Dark green, and sloshing with liquid, and well protected by several layers of soft cloths. General Monroe had handed it to her a few days ago.

"What you asked for." He told her in a low voice, handing her both the bottle, and a small jar. Aster wasn't nearly as worried about the jar, as she was the bottle, and tucked it into a pocket so she could cradle the bottle with two hands, lest it fall. Despite the green color of the glass, the whole thing seemed to glow red in the sunlight, which was dimmed through clouds. Or maybe it was just Aster's mind playing tricks on her. The contents of that bottle were highly dangerous. Hopefully to her enemies, but potentially to her, if she was careless.

Monroe glanced at Aster's truck. The entire trailer was empty, a dark, gaping maw through the open doors in the rear. All the barrels did was make jagged shapes, almost like teeth. The sun glinted red off a few shallow puddles on the trailer's floor. Oil. Alchohol. Water. The latter of which the barrels had been filled with. There was no guarantee of safe drinking water between Dystopia and Milwaukee, so every truck carried at least a few large barrels, for drinking only. There would be no washing.

"Quite a lot of room in there." He commented. The nearly hidden barrels were all that Aster had on the trailer. She had, of course, no intention whatsoever of actually _keeping _all of the water, but General Monroe did not need to know that. "What are you planning on filling it with?"

Aster looked at General Monroe as if he were insane. "Do you honestly expect me to tell you that? And does it really matter to you?"

He gave her a sour look. Normally he'd be inclined to threaten and beat the information out of her, but there was no more time for that, and he needed her cooperation. If she could get those damn lights out, it would greatly increase the odds of taking the Maestro's palace, and drastically reduce their casualties. There was a price for everything in war, he knew, and the price for this, for the sword and shield protecting his two children, was to let a madwoman engage in her madness. It was a small enough price. Unlike what passed for sanity in most other people, Aster's particular type of madness was not a danger to his children.

Which of course raised the unpleasant question of whether it was her that was mad, or everyone else. It had been the so-called 'sane' people who had fought the War a hundred years ago, and the same sort of 'sane' people who would kill his two children for whatever political power they thought it might gain them. And destroying the future of your own species was hardly an act of sanity. It was actually ironic when you thought about it. The only one in his army who was mentally fit to care for children was physically unable to have them. Probably one of God's amusing little jokes on a world he no longer had any use for.

"No, it doesn't really matter to me." General Monroe told her. Let Aster go to hell in her own way. He certainly was. Everyone in what was left of the world, was. "You don't like me much, do you?"

"No." It was pointless to deny the obvious.

"Can I ask why not?"

Aster looked in the trailer, as if she expected something to be hiding in the shadows. "I don't like being bossed. I don't like people who like to boss others. I had enough of that with the Maestro. And I didn't like it when you hung that man."

"It had to be done." Aster just looked at the ground. General Monroe took her chin and roughly forced her to look at him. "What would you have had me do? Let him go? If he didn't betray us, then once others saw that I let him go, someone else would have. We'd all be dead. You know that, don't you. I had to stop him, destroy him, for the good of us all."

"I know that." Aster said bitterly. "I didn't like it, but I didn't stop you. All I cared about was my own skin."

She couldn't put into words the rest of what she was feeling. That she was worse than General Monroe was, because she knew it was somehow wrong to kill a man just because he had been unlucky enough to have his family held as hostages by the Maestro, but that she also knew it had to be done, and didn't have the courage to do it herself. Instead, she let a sociopath do her dirty work. It made her miserable.

"I don't like it." She said. "It wasn't his fault. It seems like there should have been a better way. A way to spare his life, but still protect everyone here."

"Wishful thinking. You've read too many fairy tales. There's no sure way to destroy a man, other than by killing him. If you ever find a way, smart girl, you be sure to let me know." Never mind that he would be dead long before such a thing could ever occur.

_I'll find a way, someday._ Aster thought defiantly to herself. She stepped onto a bar set in the rear of the trailer, reached up, and slammed the doors. It was nearly time to leave. Some of the trucks had already started their engines.

"What was his name?" Aster asked General Monroe?

"His name? Whose?" He honestly didn't know what Aster was talking about.

"The man you hung." Did human life mean that little to him?

"Oh…" He actually had to struggle to recall it. He had killed so many in his life. "Fred Black. Frederick Black. Something like that. Why does it matter? He's dead."

Aster shook her head, and turned, suppressing a shudder as she walked towards the truck she hated. "He said the Maestro had his family. I'm going into that palace. Maybe I'll find them. Alive."

She left General Monroe gaping at her back.

The trip back to Dystopia did not take nearly as long as the trip out of it. The trucks were much faster than wagons had been. What had taken a couple of days by wagon took only a few hours by truck. Of course, they could not get too close to the city, or the trucks would be spotted. Then someone would call the Maestro on the radio, and as strong and fast as he was, it would not take him long to return, even if he were miles away.

The radio had to be taken out, of course. That was even more important than getting the lights out. There was still hope for taking the palace, even with the lights working, so long as the Maestro was not there. If he came back, there was no hope at all.

They had timed the trip so that it was just past sunset, with barely enough light to still drive by, when they came within 5 miles of Dystopia. There, they stopped, and parked the trucks. They would walk the rest of the distance. If they got any closer, the trucks would be seen or heard, despite the darkness. They left only the very oldest men and women and the youngest children with the trucks. They could not fight, but the men could drive. If the attack on the palace succeeded, runners would be sent back to inform the men driving the trucks. Then, and only then would they take the trucks into Dystopia, to be filled with as much useful loot as they could. If nobody came within two days… they would use the trucks to try and escape. To get to Wisconsin, if they could. It was not likely that they would succeed. A few old people and children with only what they had loaded from the mines probably couldn't fight or buy their way through to Wisconsin or into whatever society existed there. As for finding somewhere around Dystopia to hide… there was no place to go, and little left to eat. Possibly they could trade the tools and Wolfkiller's horses for sanctuary for the children. Then again, possibly not. The Maestro was going to be furious when he discovered what they had done and who in their right mind would risk his wrath in exchange for a few horses and saws?

If the Army failed, the children and elderly on the trucks were probably doomed. But they would not fall into the hands of the Maestro. There was a chest with dried nightshade berries in the cab of one of the trucks. More than enough to kill those who were staying behind. And those who were attacking each had a parchment envelope with the berries as well. Poison was better than what they would face at the hands of the Maestro.

Aster got out of the truck, with the rest of the Army. They all wore their uniforms. Their faces were grim, and more than one of them touched the parchment envelope of nightshade berries they had in their pockets, before quickly jerking their hands away, and looking eastwards, towards Dystopia, with hate etched deep on their faces. Failure was, possibly, an option, but falling into the hands of the Maestro was not. They were all agreed on that. Not that they wouldn't try to escape, rather than kill themselves, but without taking the palace and looting it for the literally tons of weapons and supplies they needed to survive, they would have precious little to escape _with, _and nowhere that they would be able to go.

Aster had her costume in a rough, hemstitched backpack, along with her weapons, climbing equipment, and the special bottle that General Wolfkiller had given her. She tugged on the straps, adjusting it to a more comfortable position. A short, thin man she didn't know stood near her, with a similar backpack. General Monroe said he was the best 'free climber' in the Army. Aster wasn't quite sure what that meant, or why climbers should possibly be paid when no-one else in the Army was. His backpack held climbing equipment just like Asters, but also tools rather than a costume. Aster didn't envy the man. Aster only had to climb a little over 2 stories up the side of the palace, on a rope that had been knotted to make it easier for her weak, woman's arms, so she could sneak in an open window or balcony on the third floor. Even with the overly-high ceilings in the palace, designed to accommodate the Maestro's height, she was going up less than 30 feet. Which was higher than the acrophobic Aster wanted to go, but the man next to her, whose job it was to disable the radio antenna, had to climb the entire height of the tallest tower on the palace.

It's true the man was going to be a hero, and Aster felt miffed that her job was only second in importance next to his, but she didn't care. She was far to frightened of heights to do what the 'free climber' was going to do. She'd be lucky if she could climb the 2 ½ stories that she needed to, without freezing. She would just have to keep from looking down, and keep her mind on the numerous excellent reasons she had for wanting to hurt and kill the Maestro any way she could.

Besides, she was no hero.

The Army divided into small groups. Between 5 and 20 people. A group as large as the entire Army of Darkness would attract attention. They didn't want attention. The darkness and stealth were their allies, as they were for all night predators, like the bat and the cat. They would not be seen or heard until they attacked, and then it would be too late for their enemies. At least, so they hoped. If everything went well.

The groups separated, taking different routes, some distance apart, and meandering towards the palace. It would only be when they were within sight of it, and it was time to attack, that they would rejoin again. Each group had two Pre-War watches. They had to be within sight of the Palace by midnight, and the attack would take place either when Aster got the lights out, or at exactly 2:34 in the morning, whichever came first.

Besides the 'free climber' there were 8 other men and 3 women with Aster. She thought she knew a few of them. Gerald Bueler. The woman was Constance Bennet, one of those who had called Aster 'Puta' until Aster had put a stop to it by knocking those women down. It didn't matter now. She was one of Aster's allies. One of the Army of Darkness. At least, so long as the attack on the palace lasted. Afterward, if she mouthed off to Aster again, Aster would knock her down again. But not now.

It was strange, coming back into Dystopia. When Aster had left it with Daniel Wolfkiller she had thought she would never return. Had it only been a few months ago? It seemed longer. The hot, dry autumn had turned into a dry spring. Not much was sprouting. It never did. The spring seemed almost more like autumn; what plants there were looked as if they were preparing to die rather than to live. In fact, the whole city was visibly less alive than it had been when Aster had left. She recognized some of the houses as they went past them. There were the houses made of old railroad cars, which last fall, had been surrounded by clucking turkeys. Now, several of the houses were smashed, and most of the turkeys gone. Aster saw a few of them, looking half starved, and there were feathery lumps lying in the mud. She shook her head. That was not good. Leaving dead animals lying about would likely sicken the living ones. But from the looks of the converted railroad cars, most of them had been abandoned. Any owners who might have buried the dead turkeys long gone. Only a few had lights showing, and those looked to be candles rather than lanterns, and hidden behind curtains as if the owners feared anyone knowing that they were still around. Aster glanced at the coverted box cars that had been smashed, and wondered what the people who had lived there had done to offend the Maestro. Probably nothing. Or merely owning turkeys, when the green monster felt like stuffing his face with them. Which amounted to nothing, so far as Aster was concerned.

The small group of soldiers Aster was with brought a few glances, but nobody seemed very interested in them. There seemed less people on the streets, even so late at night, than there had been, and those people who _were_ on the streets were traveling in well armed groups, pretty much indistinguishable from the one Aster was with. They drew suspicious glances, which turned relieved when they did not offer to fight anyone else, but no more than that. Taverns and brothels that should have been open until near dawn were mostly closed, and those that were open had bars on the windows and strong looking guards standing on either side of their doors. Aster shook her head. If the Maestro should choose to smash those buildings, neither the bars nor the guards would slow him down in the least.

One of the taverns, Aster remembered, had had a large apple tree growing in front of it. It was known for the hard cider it had brewed and served. The apple tree was still there, but there was something wrong with it. It should have been showing tender leaves at this time of year. Even though there had been little rain, the roots of the tree went deep enough to tap into groundwater. But there were no leaves, and only a few half-withered buds that looked like they might possibly become leaves or flowers, but would more likely dry up and fall off.

"Hold on a moment." Aster said to the other members of the Army of Darkness. The condition of the tree was odd enough that she wanted a closer look at it. She took a torch from one of the men, and held it closer to the tree. There were several piles of crusty lumps of something around the base of the tree, hard to see in the dark. Aster ran her finger across one of the piles, and tasted it with the tip of her tongue. Bitter. She spat several times, until the taste was out of her mouth. Someone had deliberately poisoned the tree. God only knew why. There weren't that many apple trees left in Dystopia. Or very many trees of any kind.

Some sort of slimy fungus, about the only wet thing on a tree that _should _have been damp with new spring leaves, was growing on the trunk. It was maroon colored, looking almost like blood dripping from the tree. Aster shook her head.

"And the red death held indomitable sway over all." She muttered as she handed the torch back to the man who had lent it to her.

"What's that?" He said, not hearing her half-whispered words.

"Nothing." Aster shook her head. Except for the spots where the blood-looking fungus grew, the tree seemed dried and mummified. "Nothing important. Something from a book I once read. It doesn't matter. This place is dying. The Maestro is killing it. He might kill himself as well, but it doesn't matter. I don't think anyone will be able to live here, anymore, after a while. General Monroe is right. We need to _get out._"

About fifteen minutes after they had passed the tavern with the dead apple tree, they drew within sight of the Maestro's palace. A few other groups of soldiers from the Army of Darkness were already nearby, but had been waiting for Aster's group. They needed the lights, and most importantly, the _radio,_ disabled, before they dared attack. Aster and the other soldiers with her nodded at the groups they passed, but said nothing.

They cut sidewise a few blocks, then circled around to the back of the palace, somewhere between the stables and the charnel pits. Or rather, where the stables had _been. _It appeared that most of the horse barns had been knocked down, probably by the Maestro in an insane fit, though Aster saw the skeleton shapes of wooden frames with a few sections of walls and roofing on them. Evidence of rebuilding by someone, but a rather poor job of it. From what she remembered, the old stables had had support beams that measured 2x8, and cut neatly at matching angles. The new structures looked at if they were made of 2x4's, cut with straight ends and nailed together by someone who didn't know much about carpentry. The first heavy snow would probably cave it in. Not that it snowed much in Dystopia. But the buildings still wouldn't last. Aster kicked lightly at the bottom of one of the half-finished walls as they snuck past them. The wood was resting directly on the ground, rather than on stone foundations, the support beams not even buried to steady them. It was leaning slightly to one side, and already starting to rot. The whole structure looked like an over-sized fort made by ignorant children, who knew nothing at all about construction. The sort of thing that would last a year or three, before they outgrew it and it fell down without their knowing or caring. But perhaps ignorant people were all that were left, to try to rebuild the stables.

The stink of the charnel pits grew worse, as they snuck closer to them. Aster looked down for a moment, then away. She didn't like heights, and didn't want to see her sister's body. Not that she was likely to see what was left of Thumb, even if it hadn't been dark, other bodies had no doubt been thrown on top of her sister in the months since the Maestro had raped her to death.

One of the soldiers with her was taking out some grappling hooks, the ends padded with leather. So this was it. Aster looked up. The window she needed to climb in was dark. Nobody in the palace liked to be too close to the smells coming from that pit, unless they had to. Climbing and getting in would probably be safe. She was not likely to be seen or heard. But it seemed terribly high up, as if she were climbing 300 feet, rather than a mere 30 or so. And what if she fell, and somehow fell _outwards_, into that awful pit of bodies? She could be hurt, and trapped in that living grave, and never get out again. She'd spend the rest of her life in that stinking hell.

Aster forced herself to look down again, imagining her sister's body in one of the lumpy shapes down below, ripped in half by that green bastard's oversized cock. She bit her lip until she tasted blood. She needed the hate. It was the only thing stronger than the fears she had inside her.

"Let's do this." She told the man with the hook. He was attaching the thick rope to it, with a complex knot. Another man was fitting an arrow with a grappling hook for a tip and a slender cord attached to a crossbow. She shivered. She was damn glad she didn't have to climb _that_ rope, to disable the radio antenna. Her rope at least had knots to hold on to, and was thick and solid. Aster had insisted on that, even though General Monroe had tried to convince her that the thin cords were perfectly safe. He had even had her hang from a thin cord, then hung three times her weight from one of them, just to prove they were strong. But it was no good. Aster _knew_ they were safe. But she couldn't _believe _it. Not enough to make herself climb one higher than 6 feet or so. In the end, General Monroe had had to give in. Aster was the only one who knew her way around the palace, and if she could only climb a thick rope, then someone would just have to carry the weight, no matter how hard it was on them.

Then there was a long period of waiting. The radio had to be disabled first, before Aster could try to get the power out. The guards would probably not notice that a wire to the radio had been cut. It wasn't as if they were constantly chattering to the Maestro 24 hours a day. But they would definitely notice when the lights went out. Or when they were attacked by the rest of the Army of Darkness. They would try to contact the Maestro about _that._ If they could. The man climbing to the radio antenna needed to make sure that they _couldn't._ If he failed, the attack would have to be called off, and everything they had planned would come to nothing.

Aster watched as the man called a 'free climber' pulled himself up a slender rope that she would never have been able to have faith in. Once he was about halfway up the palace, he vanished in the shadows, and she and the others with her kept gazing upwards, wondering if the man was still climbing… if he had reached the antenna… if he was even now disabling it. Or if he had been caught… killed… the alarm raised… and even now, guards coming in search of them.

He at least hadn't fallen. They would have heard it if he had fallen.

Fifteen long minutes went by. Then twenty. It was eerie. It reminded Aster of when she and Thumb had waited in a dark basement for their father, not knowing if he would ever return. Then there was a shape. A white strip of cloth, an old metal nut sew to one side for weight, came fluttering down from unseeable heights. One of the men hooted like an owl, twice. That was the signal. The radio had been disabled. The man would stay where he was, until the attack was over. If he descended before the attack, he might be caught and the alarm raised, and it would be far too dangerous for him to attempt the long climb down during the attack, with bullets and arrows and who knew what else whizzing around.

And now it was Aster's turn. She had almost forgotten, while waiting for the 'free climber' to signal that he had disabled the radio. Fearful, she looked up the the dark, open, third story window she had to climb through. It was only 30 feet up. She had thought it looked like 300.

Now, it seemed almost like 3000.


	29. Chapter 29

Chapter 29. The Invading Darkness

Aster had almost forgotten what she had to do, watching the climber and waiting in the silent darkness for him to either succeed or fail. The man holding the thick coil of rope, the only one Aster could bring herself to climb, made several coils of it, arranged them next to the padded grappling hook, swung it around several times, then flung it upwards! Aster watched as the loops of rope soared, then slowed, then there was a muffled _thunk._ The coils unwound, and a foot of the rope actually rested on the ground. The man pulled on the rope as hard as he could, but it stayed in place.

She bit her lip, checked that the straps of her backpack were tight one last time, and took the rope in one trembling hand. She was wearing dark , soft clothing. Her cloak and pin were in the pack, along with the _seductive_ disguise, the clothing that would make her look like a _Betty_, that she would need to get close enough to the guards to kill them. Aster did not like going back to looking like a _Betty, _and intended to wear the outfit for as short a time as she could, before putting on her uniform from the Army of Darkness. She reached one arm back and squeezed a lower corner of the backpack for luck. Just having the Army uniform with her was comforting, though she could not wear it. A dangling cloak would just get in the way of climbing

"Quiet when you climb." The man who had thrown the rope whispered a warning to her. Aster was known for whimpering in fear when climbing the ropes, if she wasn't reminded not to.

Aster nodded. As bad as climbing the rope was, it would be far _worse_ to get caught at it. Dying from falling would be better than what the Maestro would do to her, if he caught her alive.

She grabbed the rope, and pulled her feet onto the first knot. The first few feet were alright, then she was above her own body height, and felt her heart thumping as if it wanted to beat it's way out of her chest. She was gasping in fear, and that was not good. She needed to think of something besides the rope and how high she was. But what was there to think about?

She remembered when she had been afraid as a child, hiding in the basement with Thumb, while the Maestro fought the Hulk, who was actually himself. Thumb had been afraid, too. More afraid than Aster had been. Thumb had been the prettier one, but Aster had been healthier and stronger. She had sung a song, then, to try and cheer both herself and her sister up. Aster grabbed another knot, and pulled her feet upwards, humming inside her throat, so no-one could hear.

"_The itsy bitsy spider, crawled up the water spout…"_

Aster was a spider… crawling upwards, just like in the song… she pulled her legs up to the next knot.

"_Down comes the rain, and it washed the spider out…"_

But there was not much rain in Dystopia, and Aster could not go back down like the spider. Up another knot.

"_Out comes the sun, and it dried up all the rain…"_

But they were the Army of Darkness. They needed to win this war at night. Once the sun came up, it would be too late. Up another knot, then another.

"_So the itsy-bitsy spider, crawled up the spout again."_

Her song had run out, and Aster did not want to hum it to herself again. She kept crawling up, like the spider. She began mentally listing the reasons she had to hate the Maestro. Her rape. Her ruined parts. The children she would never have.

She pulled herself up another knot. There were many more reasons to hate that Green Bastard. Her sister… raped to death. Her father… driven to suicide.

Hate was warm. It was even more solid than the overly-thick rope Aster climbed.

What other reasons, to hate the Maestro? The animals in the zoo, that he had eaten into extinction. The zoo itself, gone. Just another graveyard in a world full of them. And now she would never be Zookeeper, would she? Not for real. Not ever - ever - ever.

Her hand reached the window. Aster was tempted to try and pull herself up, but she knew better. She was no-where near as strong as the free-climber who had disabled the radio antenna. Her arms could, with great difficulty, support her body weight.

When she was fresh.

Not tired from climbing as she was now.

She counted in her head, in order to concentrate on getting high enough to get through the window safely. One potato - slide her hands up, one onto the ledge, one holding the rope. Two potatoes. Get her feet up on the next knot. Three potatoes. Both hands on the ledge, holding tightly. Four potatoes…. up again with her feet. Five…She nearly fell forwards. Her waist was above the ledge of the open window. Aster leaned forwards, getting her body and center of gravity through the window. If she fell, at least she would fall inwards, and not down.

She wiggled, more than climbed, onto the floor. The tiles were cold and dusty, and there were bits of leaves scattered near the edges of the hallways, as if it hadn't been swept, or whoever had swept it had merely cleared a path by pushing the debris to either side, rather than actually doing a proper cleaning job and removing it. Aster regarded the floor. The tiles were fairly shiny near the center of the hallway. Probably someone was sweeping it, most likely they were too afraid _not _to sweep it when they were told, but was pushing a wide broom through this disused, unlit part of the palace as fast as they possibly could.

A gust of wind blew, and the open window swung slightly, the glass rattling in the panes. The noise made Aster shudder, but she was glad of it. The more odd noises there were, the less likely any noises she made by accident would be noticed.

She took five deep breaths, deliberately relaxing and thinking. She looked at her shoes. Dry. Good. She didn't want to leave wet footprints coming from the window opening. She glanced around, getting her bearings, and remembering the layout of the palace. As she recalled, there was a small bathroom around two corners. She wanted to crouch and scurry along the shadows of the wall, like a rat sneaking through a dark house, but forced herself to walk. Someone walking might possibly be assumed to have valid business in the palace, but anyone sneaking would be known to be an enemy. It still made her nervous. Darkness and cover were her friends. Exposing herself was dangerous. That had been hammered into her dozens if not hundreds of times during the past few months.

The bathroom was probably only 300 feet or so from where Aster had entered, but the distance seemed more like a mile. Fortunately, nobody saw her, and she only saw one person, a guard scurrying, as she dared not, making his way through the intersection of a connecting hallway, and looking over his shoulder. Aster heard his footsteps, and flattened herself against the wall, holding still. Luckily the guard did not look her way, apparently more interested in whoever or _whatever_ might be pursuing him, and two seconds later he had crossed the intersection and was gone.

Aster waited ten more seconds, then made her way to the intersection, and paused. If someone or _something_ were after the guard, she did not want to encounter him, her, them or it. She waited and listened. She couldn't hear anything, but could all too easily imagine all sorts of horrors that made no sound at all. At least, not until it was too late.

Fortunately, she had thought of and planned for the possibility of having to look around corners, without being seen, or exposing herself. Slowly, making sure not to make any noise, Aster took off her backpack. She unbuttoned the flap on top, and felt around by hand, until she came across a particular cloth wrapped shape. It was a long, padded pouch. Aster took it out and opened it. Inside was a small Pre-War artificact. A _dental mirror. _The traveling dentist who had sometimes visited the Zoo to clean or fix her family's teeth had used one, and Aster had told General Monroe what she needed. General Monroe know what a _dental mirror_ was, though very few other members of the Army did, and he had had to have Trask draw a picture of one and show it to the other members of the Army, until they found someone who had one. Which General Monroe had _confiscated_ and given to Aster.

The mirror was a bit fuzzy from being in the cloth pouch, so Aster gave it a quick swipe, then crouched down as low as she could. It would actually have been better to _lay_ down in some ways, the lower the mirror was, the less likely it would be seen, but she could not get up and start running as quickly from a prone position as she could from a crouch.

Carefully, slowly, she poked the mirror out into the hallway. She knew that the human eye was attracted to motion, and the faster the motion, the more likely it was to attract someone's eye. So she made herself take a full minute to get that mirror fully extended out into the hall, then looked at it, very slowly angling it slightly up, down, then to one side.

Nothing. Nothing that she could see. Unless whatever might be pursuing the guard might be invisible, which didn't seem likely, and if that were the case, there was nothing she could do about it, and she was completely screwed, so she might as well operate on the assumption that if she saw nothing, there _was _nothing.

Aster had been holding her breath without realizing it, and forced herself to take five slow breaths. Then, slowly, she turned the mirror over, so it was facing the other way, and she could look the other way in the hall, towards the direction the guard had gone.

Again, nothing.

Whoever or whatever the guard might have been fleeing from was not there. Perhaps they had given up, or the guard had eluded them. Or perhaps he was merely fleeing fears from his own demented imagination. Or perhaps not so demented. The situation in the palace and the Maestro's mindset being what they were, the sane reaction to a great deal that was undoubted going on probably would be to panic and flee. If not out of the palace entirely, then at least from a more dangerous part of the palace to a less dangerous part.

Still, it was bad. Back when Aster had been a child, when she had still been living at the Zoo, with her father and sister, she had had a taste for Pre-War horror fiction, of which there was quite a lot at the Library. She even remembered the authors, like it was yesterday. Stephen King. Dean Koontz. It seemed that the people who lived before the War, having rather little to fear for real in their own lives, liked to write stories about imaginary fears. Stories about horrible places, with frightened people, and awful demonic monsters. Much like Aster was living in now. The books had made it almost seem fun, there had always been Heroes that were brave, and knew exactly how to defeat the monster in a few days or weeks, by the end of the book. Sometimes they had even been helped by God.

But Aster was no Hero.

She was not brave, she wasn't even sure there was a God, and she had only a slight hope, a very poor chance at best, of _someday_, not days or weeks, but more likely _decades_ in the future, of possibly defeating the monster.

The Maestro.

Right now, all she and the Army of Darkness could do (and the Heroes in the books always defeated the monsters by themselves, they did not need a whole Army to help them, which just proved to Aster that she was no Hero), was to steal stuff they needed from the monster, while he was far enough away that they would not have to fight a battle they would lose, and use the stuff to hopefully run away from the monster and survive.

For as long as they could, anyways.

Having decided that the hallway was clear, Aster put the backpack on again, and crossed the hall, walking as quickly as she dared, without looking suspicious. The bathroom was only 30 feet past the intersection. It was close, now, though it had seemed so far away only a few moments before.

There were no lights on in the bathroom, although there was a switch by the door. And something stunk. Badly. It smelled like the charnel pits. Something in the bathroom was dead, and rotting. Aster forced away the temptation to try the switch, even though not knowing what was dead in there or what might have killed it made her nervous. Light could be seen for a long distance. Darkness and stealth were her friends. Once the door closed, it was pitch black, far darker than it had been in the hallway. Aster frowned in the darkness. She had to have a little bit of light for what came next.

Taking off her backpack again, Aster opened it and felt around until she found a fat candle, and a book of matches. Slowly. She had to force herself to go slowly. She set the candle against her leg, where she could feel it, and struck a match.

Now, she could see. She lit the candle and set it up by the counter, next to the sink. Then she immediately blanched, and had to bite her lip.

There was a head in the sink. A drip of water from the faucets had made it rot with wetness, rather than mummifying. It was, undoubtedly, the source of the horrible stink in the bathroom. But perhaps that was good, if it were well known that there was a rotting head in this bathroom, most of the inhabitants of the palace would keep out of it.

Macabre though it was, Aster, always being interested in anatomy, couldn't help but analyze the head. It seemed smallish. Aster felt her own head. She didn't want to touch the dead thing in the sink, but the skull seemed far smaller than hers. A child, most likely, though it could maybe have been a woman. Most women were smaller than Aster. The teeth would have told her, but they were hidden on the underside of the head, and Aster didn't want to poke around with it. It was gross with slime and maggots, and she had better things to do.

Of course, having the sink occupied by a severed head was inconvenient. She was going to need water. Just in case. The stuff in her bottle was dangerous. And there was at least some water pressure. Otherwise there would have been no drip on the head.

Like all of the smaller bathrooms in the palace, there was supply closet. The door in this one had been torn off the hinges, and the more useful items like soap and paper towels were gone, but the bucket, used for mopping the floors was still there.

The wastebasket was also still there, although it smelled bad, and there were flies buzzing around it. Aster didn't care. There were numerous wadded paper towels in it, and she wrapped several of them around her hand, and moved the head out of the sink. Wrinkling her nose, she put it in the wastbasket and covered it with the paper towels. Good. Now she could slant the bucket under the faucet.

She turned the faucet only slightly, so the water trickled out. No noise. No chances. She couldn't take any chances. It took like what seemed forever, but was really only a few minutes for the bucket to get approximately half full, which is all Aster could manage with the awkward angle under the low faucet. It would have to be enough, if she needed it.

Now, she had to disguise herself. Aster set the candle near the mirror, and placed her backpack on the counter. She took out the _Betty_ clothes, the small jar General Monroe had given her, and a bag of cosmetics, some from before the war, some made out of things such as powdered coal, reddish clay, and dark purplish ground up berries. She rummaged around some more and took out her weapons, the gun and knife. She set them on the counter as well.

Aster stripped, taking off her dark Army clothes, and even her underwear. However, before she made herself up, there was something she had to do. She reached again into her backpack, and took out two green, silk sheets. The sort used in the palace. Which apparently were being stolen and sold by one (or perhaps more than one) of the guards, as General Monroe had had several of them in the Underworld.

Aster spread one of the sheets out on the bathroom floor. The tiles were dirty, but that was fine. Dirty would help what she hoped to accomplish later. Then she stepped into the middle of the sheet, squatted down, and strained until she manage to relieve herself. Both defecating and urinating. It stunk of course, but that didn't matter. It actually smelled better than the rotting head in the wastebasket, and the smellier it was, the better. God, what a mess, though. There was a big puddle, but unlike the water, oil, and alcohol puddled around the Underworld, she sure as hell didn't want to walk in it. Fuck the Maestro for bringing her to the point where she had to do such things. Her crotch was wet, and she wiped herself with the underwear she had just removed. She tossed the underwear disgustedly in the middle of the messed sheet. She'd have to get a new pair, later. For now, she wasn't intending to wear any, anyways.

Aster put her dark Army clothing, her shoes, her socks, and her brassiere into her backpack, where her cloak was. She threw it into the closet where she had gotten the bucket, and closed the door. If someone saw a _Betty_ with such an odd item as that battered backpack, it would arouse suspicions. If the Army managed to take the palace, she would come back for it later. If they failed, it wouldn't matter.

Turning back to the sink, Aster picked up the small jar and opened it. It was full of some sort of clear, odorless grease. A wrinkled, torn label said 'Vaseline'. However, it no longer contained 'Vaseline'. It was full of the lye soap that they made at the mines, which had been deliberately cooked to remain soft and slimy rather than hard as it should be. And it was mixed with powdered limestome. She wasn't sure if the stuff would help, but she thought it might, and the whitish tone to the stuff would make her skin look paler, and aid in her disguise. Still, it was a thin barrier of protection against that stuff in the bottle. But it was all she had. And it might help. All the books Aster had read said it would, and she trusted the books to have their facts right. So she _knew_ it would help. But as with the thin rope, _knowing _something and _believing_ it were two different things. But whether she could believe it or not, it was all she had, there was no better protection the way there was a better rope. Not that she could use, anyways. So she had to use it, whether she completely trusted it or not.

She scooped some of greasy, whitish soap up with two fingers, and began rubbing it all over her whole body, from the bottom of her feet, and all the way up onto her face, and even her hair. It made her hair look disgusting, but that didn't matter. It was going to be covered with the wig. She smoothed the stuff out over her skin. The oily sheen actually looked rather sexy, which was good. Sexy would help seduce and distract the guards.

She slicked back her hair, and put on the wig, looking in the mirror as she slid clips into place to hold it firmly. The blond locks were tangled, and Aster carefully went through them with a comb. Watching herself in the mirror was eerie. With the poor candle light, the weight she had lost from the scanty food over the past several months, the blond wig and the white limestone in the soap making her face a few shades paler, she could have been Thumb's twin. Except for being far taller than Thumb had been, the last she had seen her. But Aster had been short when she was young, and gained her height at a fairly late age. Who knew how tall Thumb would have been?

If she had lived, that was.

Thinking about how Thumb had died, raped to death by the Maestro, made Aster angry and sad again. She thought about what would likely happen when she used the stuff in the bottle. It probably would not be pretty or pleasant. Good. Something ugly and painful was exactly what the raping guards in the palace deserved. Especially Paul Rasse.

Aster put on the _Betty _clothes, sheer green silks, without even underwear underneath. The more of her body that was semi-visible, the more distracted the guards would get. Who cared what they _saw?_ They'd be dead soon enough, if things went according to plan, and would never get to brag about it. Not that she really cared that much, anyways.

Besides, everything they saw was bait.

Bait in a trap.

Aster's trap.

General Monroe and Daniel Wolfkiller had hammered that into her head. And she _knew_ it was just brainwashing, but like so much else, _knowing _was not _believing. _Besides, the thoughts made good sense, and it was no more than what the Maestro's raping guards deserved. Aster had lived for five years in a trap. Now it was their turn. And it had been far longer than five years, really. She'd been born into a trap. Into a cage. Like everyone in Dystopia. It was only now that she had the chance to turn the tables, and hopefully to get out.

_But how will you get out of the cage in your own head, Zookeeper?_

Her thoughts sounded mockingly like the Maestro's voice, and she pushed them away. She would get out. Or if not out, maybe she could at least _move _the cage she was in somewhere else, where the Maestro could never find her, and maybe even make it _bigger_ so that she wouldn't mind it so much. Then maybe she would finally have a little peace.

Aster put on the phony high-heeled shoes, which _looked _as if they ought to raise her height, but actually didn't. It was all part of the deception. Don't let the enemy see you, and if you must let him see you, make sure that what he sees is a lie. Then she took the cosmetics, and carefully put them on, the way Missy had taught her. She guessed it looked nice, and seductive, though Aster had never really been that interested in her looks other than being clean and neat.

It was just bait, anyways. Bait in a trap. If men were so stupid that they would turn down an opportunity for actual sex, in favor of getting to look at a few grams of color on someone's face, that was hardly Aster's fault. Had she been in charge of the world, she would have given men more brains.

There was a bottle of perfume in Aster's backpack. It was actually of modern-day manufacture, consisting of lemon oil dissolved in alcohol. It had a strong, sharpish-sweet smell, and Aster deliberately put just a little too much of it onto her silken _Betty _clothes, as the stuff would dissolve the thin layer of soap she had applied to her skin. Again, it was part of the deception. The stuff in the bottle had a nasty smell, and she wanted to partially deaden the noses of the guards. Every sense of theirs she could take away or fool, their sight, their hearing, their sense of smell, was one more advantage on her side.

Looking in the mirror, she looked like a proper _Betty. _Far more so than when she had actually been one. Other than wearing the scanty clothing, which she had had no choice in, she had never bothered to make up her face or wear perfume. Why would she have? Being physically pre-adolescent, she had had no interest in sex with the Maestro, or the guards, or anyone else. Though she was occasionally interested now, there was really no specific man she wanted to get involved in. Her drunken attraction towards Daniel Wolfkiller's muscles from the party the Army of Darkness had had a few nights ago did nothing but disgust her now that she was sober. And even if there had been someone she was interested in… what could she ever really offer him? The Maestro had ruined her for ever having sex. All she could ever be was empty bait.

Well, if she was bait, she would be the best damn bait the world had ever seen, until she got the bastards into the trap she was setting for them. She thought about some of the horror books she had read, at the Library. Female vampires were often basically bait in some of the books. They lured in human men into their trap by looking seductive, then killed them. Which was much what Aster intended. So be it.

She made a coy face in the mirror, imagining slender female vampire fangs nearly hidden by only slightly parted lips, or a slow tongue. Female vampires would never be afraid of merely human men like the guards. So she would pretend to be one, then she would be less afraid than weak little Aster was.

She was not going to need the cosmetics any more. She threw them into the wastebasket, where she had thrown the head. For a moment she wondered what was attracting the flies to the wastebasket, as they had been buzzing around it even before she had thrown the rotting head in there, then shrugged. She didn't really want to know and getting the smell of death on her would ruin the deception she had so carefully created.

The last part of the deception was to hide her weapons. Aster tucked her gun under the wide, metallic green sash at her waist and placed the curved knife under her garter, where it's shape was hidden by the sheer skirts. Then she took her bottle and a carefully wrapped, delicate Pre-War wineglass out of the backpack. She put them, along with the bottle of perfume in the bucket, under the water. She re-sealed the jar of soft soap, making sure the cap was tight, and put that into the water as well. Then she picked up the sheet she had messed, and making a disgusted face, wadded it up. She used the second sheet to wrap up the first one, and the bucket. She adjusted it, yanking at the corners of the sheets, until it looked like a random ball, and not a perfectly formed cylinder like the bucket inside.

If anyone should stop her in the hallway, she would tell them a cock and bull story about being forced to take a mess down to the laundry. And it was messy. She could smell the mess right through both sheets. Nobody smelling _that_ would want to go poking through a pile of dirtied laundry to see exactly what might be in it.

Deception. Always deception. If you had to let the enemy see you, make sure that what they see is a lie, and if you have to let the enemy smell you, make sure that what they smell is a lie.

Besides. They thought shit was funny enough when they had raped her and smeared it in her hair and on her face. Let's see how funny they would think it was once she was through with them.

Aster blew out the candle, picked up the wadded, stinking mass of cloth, and left the bathroom. She quickly made her way to the lighted hallways in the part of the palace that was still inhabited. _Betties _were timid, and certainly did not like the darkness, the way Aster and other members of the Army of Darkness did. It was stupid when you though about it. Darkness couldn't hurt them, and would make it harder for the Maestro or Paul Rasse and his rape buddies to find them.

Stepping into the hallway, exposed to the dangerous light, Aster put on a face. She imagined she were a female vampire, looking for just the right place to ambush a weak, helpless human man, before ripping out his throat and drinking his rotten blood. And until that time, she would be bait. Seductive. She widened her eyes, trying to project both innocence and nervousness, and put on a slightly embarrassed looking face, at the stinking mess she carried. She pushed her chest forward and lowered the wadded up mess of sheets, so her breasts could be more easily seen. Deliberately, she wiggled her hips. Missy had shown her how high heels made your hips sway more, when you walked in them. Aster's shoes, being part of her disguise, _looked_, like high heels, but were actually flat. But she had to remember the _deception_ and move as if they actually were real high heels.

The light in the hallway seemed brighter, and bluer than Aster remembered. She squinted at it, not sure if the color was actually off, or if she was too used to moonlight and fire as the main sources of light. There was an odd, occasional flickering, as if the voltage or something in the electricity made by the palace generators was slightly off. Or perhaps the bulbs were going bad. Like everything else in the palace. Like everything else in the world, she supposed. Even the green marble hallways, although they had been well cleaned here, were missing tiles here and there. Back when she had been a _Betty, _they would have been quickly replaced; Aster knew there was a whole store room full of thousands of them. But now either nobody cared, or nobody knew how to replace them, or everyone was too afraid to replace them.

Aster shook her head at the dark holes where tiles ought to be. She remembered as a child, blowing soap bubbles, and looking closely at them in the light. The process the bubbles went through reminded her of what was happening to the hallway. They got thinner and thinner, and tiny holes, smaller than pinheads, began appearing in the surface of the soapy liquid. There were more and more holes… and then suddenly the bubble would pop!

_God help us!_ She thought. _Don't let that happen! Not to the little animals! Not to the world! Let SOMETHING be left! Otherwise I don't think I could stand it!_

The fact that she herself would not be around to have to 'stand it' if the world were simply to fade and vanish like a soap bubble didn't occur to her. Besides, she wasn't even sure if there were a God or not. Aster shuddered, putting her deceptive, seductive face back on. Even if there were a God, he never seemed to help or care about her. If the world were not to vanish, it would be up to her to do something about it. She went down two hallways, and saw three guards coming towards her. Her heart beat, and she wanted to run, but she forced herself to smile, and shrug slightly instead. She moved more carefully, so as not to slosh the water in the bucket, and make a noise that could be heard. One of the guards sniffed, getting a noseful of the mess she carried.

"Phew, girl! What you got there?"

"Oy, geez." Aster deliberately used an accent from a particular part of the Wastelands that she had practiced for the past several weeks. One of General Monroe's 'Lieutenants' (which meant that he was part of his original gang of bandits) had been from that area and coached Aster. It was all part of the deception. If you had to let the enemy hear you, make sure that what he heard was a lie. "Wooldz yooz b'lieve thart heez toohk onlies fifteern secoonds toor feeneesh, thehnz heez toohk ar doomp rooht onz ther behdz! Thehnz heez tillz MEEZ toor teekz eetz toor thar loondreez foor meekingz heemz feeneesh toor fahstz!"

It was a well thought out story. Messing the sheets after sex was a fairly common practice among some of the nastier guards. Such as Paul Rasse and his friends. Sometimes they even urinated or defecated right on the _Betty_, if they were in a particularly nasty mood. Although it had never happened to Aster (Rasse and his friends generally raped her on the floor of store rooms, not in a bed), she had heard the other _Betties_ often talking about the matter in disgusted tones. Aster shrugged again, and gave the blond hair of her wig a slight toss, in the manner that Missy had taught her.

The _deception _worked. The guards laughed.

"Rasse!" One of them snorted and slapped his leg.

"Thought he was …" The guard shrugged. He looked Aster up and down. "I'd finish too fast, too! This one's fresh. Barely touched, by the sound of her. Hasn't lost her country accent yet. Hell, maybe hasn't even lost her cherry. Or if she has, maybe at least has some cherry juice left."

All three guards thought this hilarious, and laughed. One of them snorted "Nice tits, by the way." He reached out as if to pinch one of them, but changed his mind after taking another glance at the smelly bundle Aster was carrying. He stepped back and shook his head.

"Get yourself down to the laundry, girl. And get a bath. You're stinking up the place. You need to be appetizing, if you know what I mean. Or you might just find yourself on the menu."

Aster nodded and moved past them. She heard them snickering, and one of them said: "She looked wet. Think he peed on her, too?"

The guards laughed louder, but by this time Aster was well past them. So the oily sheen of the soap had been noticed, but fortunately they had come to a completely wrong conclusion about it. Deception. Always deception, when dealing with the enemy. The enemy did not deserve truth. Not an ounce of it. Truth was a privilege reserved for one's friends.

She thought of the joke the guard had made, a few moments before. So that's what it had come to, here. They had gotten so used to the Maestro's cannibalism that they now thought it _funny. _Probably they thought of him as some sort of evil god, like the Aztecs used to worship. How a god with habits like that could be thought worthy of worship was unfathomable to Aster, but apparently enough people could wrap their minds around it that the Aztecs had based a whole culture on it. Screw them. She had done bad things and eaten bad things while she was in the Army. She had gotten into scraps with her fellow soldiers more than she should have, and eaten bugs and rats. But she didn't eat little six year old kids and laugh about it. So screw them. The enemy was nothing but scum. They didn't deserve the truth, and they did deserve what she was going to do to them. Every bit of it. Even what was in her bottle. Maybe even _especially_ what was in the bottle.

Her pace slowed, as she replayed her encounter with the guards, inside her mind. Despite their snickering and lewd behavior and horrible joke, hadn't there been a hint of guilt, a shadow over their faces? The ghost, perhaps, of the odd, guilty expression she had seen on the faces of the people from Wisconsin, the numerous times they had become evasive and refused to answer her questions about the Vampire, Morbius. The deliberate, wide-eyed mask of innocence combined with seductiveness slipped from her face. Her eyelids squinted slightly and her focus glazed, as thoughts seemed to click into place in her mind. Then she shook her head. She couldn't think through complex problems. Not here. Not now. She had to concentrate on her disguise. Her deception. She had to be strong and vicious. The hunting, female Vampire. Bait for her prey. Not weak little Aster Aversa.

She continued down the hallways, a few times encountering areas where several lights had burned out, making holes of blackness, much like the missing tiles did. Once, she saw a rat. She ignored it. There had been plenty of rats back in the Underworld, at least before most of them had been eaten. Once, she saw what looked like part of the skeleton of a small hand, resting on an ornate wooden table, almost as if it were an art display of some kind. For some reason, Aster found this to be highly disturbing. She looked away and moved on.

Eventually, Aster drew close to the room where she knew the fuses and breakers in the palace were. She did not look around the corner. Either it was still guarded by two guards, in which case peering around the corner and pulling her head back would simply draw suspicion. Or there were no guards, in which case she was far luckier than she hoped to be. Or there were more than two guards in which case she would have to give up on her plan. She doubted she could take on more than two men, and she wouldn't risk herself on pointless heroics doomed to failure. She was no Hero. Not like the dead ones in the Hall of Fallen Heroes.

Nervousness threatened to make Aster move more quickly than she should, and make mistakes. That would not do. General Monroe had had everyone in the Army go through (in shifts) an exercise he had devised, taking apart some car doors that someone had scavenged from somewhere, removing a plastic panel, then foam, then taking out the window mechanism. Then putting it all back together. He gave them booklets with instructions, describing what to do with every screw and cable. He let them read the booklets, then took them away and told them they had two hours to do the job.

Two hours was actually a very generous amount of time, but the fact that there was a time limit at all had caused Aster and most of the other members of the Army to make mistakes. They forgot to reconnect wires, or arranged the cables in the door the wrong way, or dropped screws and had to hunt for them. Most of the mistakes resulted in their having to re-disassemble a door that they already partly put together, then put it together again. The result was that they all went over their time limit. Had they gone more slowly and _thought_ about what they were doing, rather than hurrying because of fear of the time limit, they actually would have finished with plenty of time to spare.

So it was with her mission. She actually had until two hours before sunrise to get the lights out, before the Army attacked anyways. Forever, really. And she'd been in the palace for only an hour. A few more minutes would not matter, but making mistakes by rushing would. Aster breathed slowly through her nose. She thought through everything she needed to do.

First, she went to a nearby store-room, where there were piled up bed sheets. She went inside, and closed the door behind her.

Carefully, she unwrapped the stinking sheets she had around the bucket, making sure not to get any of the mess on herself. She wrapped the dirty sheets in several clean ones, to block the smell, and hid the entire mess behind a stack of sheets near the back of the room.

Aster smelled herself. She didn't _think_ she had gotten any of the mess on her, but she couldn't be entirely sure. She reached into the bucket and took out her large bottle, the far smaller bottle of perfume, and the wineglass. She set them down carefully, and dried them with one of the clean sheets. It wouldn't do to drop any of them because of the slippery wetness.

Aster sprayed herself with more perfume, especially the inside of her arms and the lower part of her body that had been closest to the smelly sheets. She had _thought_ the parts of the sheets she actually touched were dry and clean, but there could not be any mistakes. If there were stink on her, the perfume would help mask it.

She no longer needed the perfume. She hid the bottle under some sheets.

She _would_ likely need the bucket of water. And the jar of soap that was still in it. She put it next to the door, where it would be immediately accessible. If she wound up needing it, she would need it as quickly as possible.

Then she picked up the large bottle and the wineglass. She held the bottle in her right hand, and the wineglass in her left. Putting on a slightly despondent face, she slumped (_the better to hide her height, my dear)_, opened the door of the linen room, and went into the hallway. She turned the corner, and saw the guards in front of the room where the fuses were.

Two of them. So she hadn't gotten lucky, but her plan would work. She hoped. She sniffled loudly, wiping _near_ her face, but not actually touching it, with her left hand. She didn't want to disturb her carefully applied layer of soap. She sniffed again, as she approached the guards. The snaps that held their pistols in place were actually closed. Good. It would take the better part of a second to _unsnap_ them, then another good part of a second to draw the gun, and yet another good part of a second to aim and fire. Two seconds at least. Maybe even four. Wolfkiller and General Monroe had hammered it into her head that she would either kill (or severely injure) both the men in less than five seconds, or not at all.

They looked at her, and one of them glanced down at the pistol he wore in his belt, but saw no threat in a single, barely dressed _Betty, _who was apparently after nothing more than to drown her female sorrows in wine.

Aster sighed, and pushed her breasts forward slightly as she got closer to the guards. It had the desired effect. One of them looked her up and down. Especially down. Now that she wasn't carrying the laundry, the curve of her shaven pubic mound could be easily seen through the clothes. Aster hadn't liked having to shave there, but there was little choice. There had been no way to bleach it, and brown pubic hair simply did not match the blond wig. They could not let the enemy see even one bit of the truth. It would have ruined the deception.

"Mmm." The guard apparently liked what he saw. Both of them did.

"Where you going, girl?" One of them said. He looked at the bottle. "You steal that from the kitchen? Maybe we should report her." He turned to his partner, winking. "You think we should report her."

"Not sure." The guard said. Aster moved her shoulder slightly, letting the strap of her sheer dress fall a bare inch down her arm, and formed her lips into a slightly round shape. "What will you give us, if we don't report you, hmm?"

"P..please." Aster stuttered deliberately. "Please d…don't report me. It's not even the most expensive wine. Not the Maestro's private stock. It's the cheap stuff. And I… I was just sad. I wanted a drink or two, to cheer me up a bit before I went to bed."

She held the bottle up to her lips and licked her tongue upward, along the long neck of the bottle, letting it rest for a bare moment on the tip. "I was sad… and lonely. I had someone who… liked me… but now he doesn't any more." She sniffed again, looking at them innocently over the top of the bottle. "I could do with maybe some company. Not being alone. Maybe we could drink together, have some fun. Just a drink or two won't make strong men like you too drunk to guard this door, will it?"

She lowered the bottle so it was between her breasts, and slanted it, before pushing it slightly inwards, between her cleavage. God, men were _stupid. _But maybe thank God that they _were _stupid. A smart person like herself never would have fallen for the nonsense she was pulling.

"Yeah… it really only needs one to watch this door anyway. One at a time." The guard glanced at his partner. "What do you say?"

"Hell, the Maestro's out in the Wastelands sucking the bastards dry. He ain't going to know. And he don't share hardly at all when he's here, except with his special buddies like Rasse."

"Yeah, okay." He nodded enthusiastically, as if he could scarcely contain his feelings at his luck.

Aster gave him a slight smile, and glanced at the crotch of his uniform. "I'll pour myself just a small glass. Then you two can … share the bottle. But maybe leave a little for another glass for me, hmm?"

The guard leered at the barely disguised suggestion. Aster took the bottle in her left hand, and pulled out the cork (which of course was not actually made out of cork or anything like it) with her teeth. The smell hit her immediately. Hopefully her lemon perfume would cover it, but this had to be quick.

She poured clear liquid into the purple tinted wineglass in her right hand, raised it to her slightly parted lips… she hesitated for the briefest moment.

Her mind flashed back to when she was five, and her father was teaching her how to sterilize the operating room at the zoo, and hand him instruments when he was doing surgery. She was horrified at the thought of surgery, of cutting on the animals with sharp blades, and told her father in a gasping voice: "But it will hurt!"

Her father had had to spend some time showing her how the opium kept the animals unconscious, and that the surgery was painless. What he never understood, and what a five year old Aster couldn't explain to him was that part of what she meant was: "But it will hurt ME!".

Eventually, she had learned that the surgery did not hurt the animals OR her, but never lost what was, perhaps, far too great a degree of empathy for the sort of world she lived in. So Aster hesitated, only for a moment. A child's voice in her insisting: "But it will hurt!"

But like surgery, hurt or not, it had to be done. And as bad as it might hurt, the results of _not _doing it would be far worse. Having to see the world destroyed or vanished in front of her would drive her screaming mad. She was sure of it.

Aster lifted the glass higher. One of the guards sniffed, noticing the smell from the bottle. She could wait no longer. She took the glass from her lips -

_AND THREW IT IN THE FACE OF THE NEAREST GUARD!_


	30. Chapter 30

Chapter 30. Vitriol

"_This… is not meth." - Walter White - Breaking Bad_

What was in the Aster's bottle, of course, was not wine. Nor water. It was sulfuric acid, either stolen or derived with a nearly medieval process from iron pyrite that was to be found near what had been the Consolidated Iron Mines, and was now the Underworld.

The effect was immediate. The guard screamed, and began clawing at his face. A moment later, blood began to flow and something unspeakable happened to his eyes. Aster did not have time to worry about that. The guard who had gotten a faceful of sulfuric acid was no longer a threat to her, but she had to deal with the noise, and the other guard, very quickly.

One second. The other guard was fumbling with the snaps to his gun. Aster threw the bottle at him with her left hand, forcing him to duck, and with her right hand, drew her own gun smoothly out from under her sash. Acid splashed out of the bottle as it flew through the air, but fortunately none of it landed on Aster.

Two seconds. The bottle skittered down the hallway, and came to a rest about 50 feet away. Surprisingly, it didn't break. Sulfuric acid poured out of it, dissolving the green marble tiles beneath it. The guard gave up on fumbling with the snaps that fastened his gun, straightened, and took two steps towards Aster, who was swinging her own gun around.

Three seconds. The guard had plowed into her, knocking Aster backwards, but by doing so, had placed his body directly in front of the barrel of the gun. The horizontal stripes on Aster's costume had done their work and he had drastically underestimated her size and weight. Not to mention her strength. It was a fatal mistake, because despite his crashing into her, she was able to retain control of her gun. As she fell, she pulled the trigger.

Four seconds. Aster had fallen backwards on the floor. The guard had a hole the size of two fists in the back of his chest, and was no longer moving. Blood, chunks of tissue, and splinters of bone were sprayed all over the wall and floor behind him. His heart destroyed, the man died immediately.

Five seconds. Aster slid out from under the dead guard. The other guard was still screaming, and clawing at his face. Aster did not want to shoot her gun again. The sound could be heard from much farther away than the screams. She transferred the gun to her left hand, formed a fist with her right, and, still prone on the floor, slammed it down as hard as she could into the front of his throat. The human windpipe was not a strong structure. When hit by a hard blow, even one from a woman, it crushed easily. The guard gurgled, choking, and thrashing, not sure whether to claw at his face or throat.

Six seconds. Aster's hand burned. She had forgotten the acid on the guard's face. Fuck. She didn't know if the alkalinity of the soap and limestone mixture she had rubbed on herself had failed to neutralize the acid, or if there simply wasn't enough of it on her skin to offer decent protection. Either way, it was too late to do anything about it now. Better her hand than her face, though. And at least it was quiet.

Seven seconds. Aster took the small knife out from her garter and cut the guards's throat, getting more acid on her right hand in the process. The burning got worse. She tossed the knife away and wiped her hand on the guard's uniform.

Eight seconds. Longer than it should have taken. She looked down at the two men she had just killed, biting her lip. Blood was still flowing from their wounds.

_I'm sorry. I didn't mean it._

But sorry didn't help. It couldn't bring back the dead. And she did mean it. It was a horrible thing to do, but the guards were horrible people. Raping cannibals who worked for a monster that raped women to death and killed and ate little kids. They weren't her friends. They were her enemies.

The acid was still doing awful things to the face of the one guard, working it's chemical reaction even after his death. His eyes were puddles of bloody slime and… not wanting to see any more, Aster took off her blond wig and put it over his head, so she didn't have to look at what she had done.

There was no more noise, but several things Aster needed to do. She ran her fingers through her own soapy, greased down, brown hair, working it down into sticky dreadlocks, and forced herself to breath slowly, despite the burning in her hand. There surely couldn't be that much sulfuric acid on it. It surely couldn't be hurt that bad. It was just bad pain, because there were so many nerves in the hand. She hoped. In times like these, a person needed two working hands to survive.

But there was no time to fret over her hand. She needed to move quickly, and make no mistakes. She had time. With the Maestro as mad as he was, and the palace in the state that it was in, screams and shots were probably fairly common. It would be several minutes before anyone investigated, if they bothered at all. And by that time, it would be too late.

She trotted down the hallway, to the linen closet, and flung the door open. First things first. She plunged her right hand into the bucket, washing away most of the acid that was there. It still burned. She yanked a sheet off the shelf and used it to wipe her arm and hand. Then she reached into the bucket, took out her jar of soap, wiped it on her hand, and put it back in the bucket. The burning became less. Probably she had neutralized all the acid and gotten it off. There was an ugly looking red shade to the skin on her hand. She still wasn't sure how badly her hand was burned or whether there would be a scar, and still didn't have time to worry about it. No longer needing it, Aster set her jar of soap to one side, poured the water out of the bucket, and carried it with her.

She ran back to the room with the fuses. It was locked. Trying not to look at the two dead guards, she searched them until she found a ring of six keys on the belt of the guard she had shot. She took that, as well as a flashlight he had on his belt, and with shaking hands, hampered by the acid burns on her right hand, tried the keys until one of them worked, and she could go inside. There were what seemed like dozens of fuses. She wasn't sure which of them controlled what. It didn't really matter. Aster turned on the flashlight and set it on the floor, pointing towards the rows of fuses. She began yanking and unscrewing them at random, dropping them in her bucket. The motion made her acid-burned hand throb in protest, but she kept at it.

After about the twentieth fuse, the lights above her went out. It didn't matter. She could still see by the flashlight. She pulled all the fuses, working quickly, dropping them in her bucket. She would not leave them here, to be put back in by the enemy. The lights would go back on when _she _saw fit for them to go back on, and not before. Or else they would go back on over her dead body.

Aster heard screaming. The inhabitants of the palace were noticing the failure of the electricity, and did not like it one bit. Despite the screaming, she noticed that certain familiar background noises in the palace were gone. Turning off the electricity had brought the fans of the ventilation system and other machinery to a stop. It didn't matter. There was enough air in the palace to last for days or weeks, and the Army of Darkness would not be there for anywhere near long enough to have to worry about suffocation. Besides, they could always open all the windows, if things got stuffy. She grabbed the last few fuses, large cylindrical ones that looked old, even for pre-war objects, and dropped them in her bucket. The screaming worried her, but she forced herself to breath three times. She couldn't make any mistakes.

Aster picked up the flashlight, and put it in the bucket, the light still shining. She used the key to lock the door from the inside, then dropped that in the bucket as well. She stepped out and closed the door, then tested the knob by jiggling it. Locked. Good. She stuck the key in it and bent it sharply, so it snapped off flush. Nobody would be opening that door with another key. They would have to knock it down (probably risking the wrath of a mad Maestro) or disassemble it, before they could even find out that their precious fuses were gone. Then they could run around in the dark like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to find new ones, in the middle of what was shortly going to be a war zone.

The hallways were lit now only by dim, red emergency bulbs. It made even the green tiles look red, as if covered with blood. It wasn't much light, certainly not what the guards and _Betties _were used to, but more than enough for the night-trained members of the Army of Darkness to see by. Aster ran down several gory looking hallways, her gun in hand, testing doors. Eventually she found one that was open, and burst in, lest their be an enemy inside. But the room was full of nothing but moldy cardboard boxes that said 'Ivory Soap' on them. More soap. Aster snorted at the irony. But from the looks of it, probably fancy, Pre-War manufactured stuff, not home-made lye soap like she had used on her skin in an only partially successful attempt to neutralize the acid she had gotten on herself.

She lifted one. It was heavy. Probably 40 pounds. She began stacking the boxes in front of the door, and did not stop. There were a lot of boxes, and she had no intention of letting anyone break into the room. Because of the scanty costume and light weapons she had had to hide under it, Aster was neither dressed nor equipped to fight the guards with the rest of the Army of Darkness. She would unstack the boxes only if the Army won. She wasn't sure what she would do if they lost. Die, probably. No doubt, if the enemy won, they would be able to get into the store room eventually. By breaking through the wall if they had to.

If they tried that, she would shoot them. But she would save one bullet for herself. She had no intention of falling back into the Maestro's hands alive, to be raped to death or tossed screaming into his inferno of a fireplace.

There was shooting mixed with the screaming now. So apparently the Army of Darkness had seen the lights go out in the palace, and was attacking. Aster tucked the gun in her sash, and stacked some more boxes. She wasn't sure how many there were, but she had nothing else to do and plenty of time.

Outside the palace, the wait had seemed more like ten hours, then one, as the members of the Army of Darkness gazed at the lights of the Maestro's palace from dozens of hidden locations, anywhere from a few hundred feet to a quarter of a mile away. There were more heads on spikes in front of the palace than even those of them who had been in Dystopia only a few months before remembered. A marble statue of the Maestro in the center of the courtyard gazed balefully at those who were positioned directly in front of the palace. They gave silent thanks to whatever gods they believed in that the real Maestro was blessedly many miles away.

Nervously, those of them with watches kept checking them, while others looked up at the sliver of the moon to get an idea as to how much time had passed. It seemed such a long wait, but like Aster, they could not make any mistakes by hurrying. General Monroe had told them that they could wait four hours if they had to, for Aster to get the lights out, and it had not even been one hour.

It was barely five minutes past one hour when the members of the Army of Darkness who were closest to the palace began hearing screams. There were more screams, then they noticed windows going dark. Then the lights in front of the palace, and those illuminating the heads on spikes went out. Then, more lights in the window. Soon, all that was left was the moonlight – which from the sliver moon wasn't much – and a dim redness from a few windows of the palace. Some of the members of the Army of Darkness made forked fingers at the red lit windows, thinking that the odd colored light was possibly caused by evil spirits. But it really didn't matter. Once they killed the guards, they would kill any evil spirits that were so foolish as to try and interfere with them as well.

General Monroe looked through a pair of Pre-War binoculars at the lights in the palace going out, one window and one section at a time. There was a grim smile of satisfaction on his face. He looked at the Lieutenant next to him, a man who had been part of his gang of bandits for over 20 years.

"The damn girl's done it." He said with satisfaction. "I wasn't sure if she could, but the damn girl came through." Of course, that left him with the problem of dealing with Aster Aversa herself, but that was a minor issue. She was odd, but no threat. So he'd let her have her truck. For God only knew what purpose. Who cared. He'd be dead soon, anyways. He took out his gun and fired a shot in the air, to signal his army, then shouted the only command he needed to:

"Kill them all!"

In her store room, Aster eventually ran out of boxes of soap to stack in front of the door. She plopped down in front of one of the shelves she had emptied, feeling disgusted with herself. She was cruel, throwing acid in a man's face. That was the sort of thing the Maestro would do. Cruel, and stupid. Because it probably really only would have been necessary to put 20 boxes of soap or so in front of the door to keep the enemy out. Not the 200 or so that she had put there. Now, even if the Army of Darkness won, it would take her nearly _forever_ to unstack them and get back out again.

Her right hand still burned. Could there still somehow be acid on it? It didn't seem likely, but like so many other things, there was a difference between _knowing _that she had surely neutralized or washed off all the acid, and _believing _it. She opened one of the boxes, took out a bar, and licked it several times to get it damp. It tasted awful and made her thirsty, and she wished she had water in her bucket again instead of a collection of fuses, and when she rubbed it on her hand, it made it feel worse rather than better. But soap made any injury sting, and the Pre-War bars were dry and rough, despite her licking moisture onto them, and she _knew_ that her knowledge of chemistry was right. It had to be right. There was no reason for the chemistry books to lie. But she just couldn't _believe_ it, through the pain.

Frightened, and worried she was doing more harm then good, Aster rubbed more dampened soap on her right hand. The shots were louder now, and the screaming more panicked than ever. She wished desperately to go back out of the room, to see if the Army of Darkness was winning, but that was foolishness. Finding out whether they were winning or not would not change whether they were winning, she wasn't equipped to help them, and she would just get herself killed out of stupid curiousity and hurrying, since she would no doubt learn in the next few hours whether or not the Army of Darkness had won.

There was no way to tell time in the store room. There was no moon, and Aster didn't have a watch. She tried counting her own heartbeats, but grew bored with that after she got up to 300.

She tried humming some of the songs she knew.

_The Itsy Bitsy Spider._

_The Man From Old Milwaukee._

There were a few other songs, but they didn't help. All she could do is wait in the darkness, not knowing what would happen, not knowing if the Army would come for her, or the guards, or (God help her) the Maestro himself.

It seemed like a whole day must have gone by. But maybe not. Wouldn't she have been far thirstier than she was, after a whole day? And hungry as well? And needing to go to the bathroom?

Like so many other soldiers, throughout human history, Aster was learning that War consisted of a few brief seconds or minutes of sheer terror and violent struggle, and then endless hours or even days of the tedium of 'Hurry Up and Wait', in which she could do nothing but worry whether or not she had done her part right, or somehow made a fatal mistake, or even if she _had _done everything right, whether it would even be worth it, whether other soldiers elsewhere would succeed in _their _parts, or whether they would fail. Whether they would make a mistake, or run away, or be killed, making her own possible success all for nothing. And there was no way of knowing until things were over, one way or the other.

She hummed her songs again, and thought about her favorite foods that she had eaten, back when she had been living in the zoo, and other foods that she had heard of that she would someday _like_ to eat. Crispy pies. And roast turkey. And pineapples. She had seen pictures of pineapples in old, Pre-War magazines, but had never eaten one. She wasn't sure what pineapples tasted like. Maybe like a combination of apples and pine resin. The pictures of them in the magazines looked crisp and juicy and sweet. It had to be better than roast rat, or soup with pig guts in it, at any rate.

The shooting and screaming went on, and Aster sniffed. She looked at her burnt hand. Damn the Maestro for bringing her to this. She thought of her dream, of standing in a Zoo, _her _Zoo, with a dark haired man at her side. But it would never happen. What man would want someone ruined like her, a ruined body that could never have sex or give him children, a ruined hand that would be scarred who knew how badly, and a ruined soul, that threw acid in people's faces and then killed them, maybe just because they were afraid of the Maestro and what he would do if they didn't guard the door the way he said. It wasn't fair. She'd even had to kill a woman, Patricia, because there was nothing else she _could _do. No, she didn't deserve anything in her dreams.

Maybe she should just stay in the store room. Let it be her tomb. She looked at the stacked boxes against the door. If she were just quiet, maybe she'd die of thirst in a few days, before anyone could find or. Or… she lifted up her gun and contemplated it… she could use it on herself.

But, of course, she wouldn't. Sooner or later, she would unstack the boxes, either when she knew the Army had won, or when there was silence and she thought she could sneak out. Because she was rotten inside and would always do rotten things to save her own worthless skin. She sniffed. It wasn't fair. She had been _good_ once. A real person, once. Back when she had been little. It was the Maestro who had made her become so rotten, just to stay alive. She hated him. She wanted to be good, but couldn't. She hoped that she died, but before she did, she wanted to see _him_ dead first, just for a few seconds. Then she could die.

More time went by, Aster feeling sorry for herself. The shooting grew less, then nearly stopped, only one shot every several seconds. Aster wasn't sure what that meant. It was either very good or very bad. There was more screaming, and the distant sounds of running and scuffling. Eventually, the noise grew less, then there were loud crashes, as of furniture being knocked over and doors being broken in. Aster tried to cock her head and listen, worried that the noises would get too close to her, and someone might try to get into the store room where she was hiding.

Then there was silence. That went on for a long time, and Aster began to feel sorry for herself again. Then she heard something. First the doorknob rattling. Then, knocking on the door. She could barely hear it through the stacked boxes of soap. Probably she was hearing more of it through the walls, than the huge barrier she had created.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock, knock.

Knock, knock, knock.

Knock, knock, knock, knock, knock.

She looked up. She knew what that was. The Fibonacci sequence. She had told General Monroe what it was, and to use it to find where she was hiding. If she were still alive.

For a moment, Aster didn't want to answer. She wanted to stay where she was and die the way she deserved. But, as always, she chose to live. She stood up on wobbly legs.

"Here!" She shouted. "I'm in here!"

"Aster?" She couldn't tell who the voice belonged to, through the barrier and the wall. "Aster Aversa? Is that you?"

"Yes!" She jumped once, in excitement. "It's me! I'm here!"

There was the dim sound of the doorknob rattling again, behind the stacked boxes. There was some shouting, then a loud thump, and a crack. "Something's blocking the door. Can you get out?!"

"There's a lot of boxes in front of the door. It'll take me a while to move them."

"Well, hurry up and do it!"

Aster was sure that the person outside the door must have been a member of the Army of Darkness. They must have won. The enemy wouldn't know to use the Fibonacci sequence. Unless they tortured it out of someone. But how would they even know to ask?

Hoping her reasoning was sound, and that there wasn't another traitor like Frederick Black in the Army who had volunteered the information, either for personal gain or to secure the safety of his family, Aster began moving the boxes away from the door. It was suddenly stuffy in the room, and she felt like she were trapped in an oversized coffin, or a crypt like wealthy Pre-War people used to bury their dead in. Though the thought of dying in her own self-sealed tomb had seemed attractive only a little while before, when she didn't know if any good would come of the awful thing she had done, now that she knew that victory had been achieved, Aster wanted out, to be in the cool, open air of the night, not trapped like someone buried alive.

It took almost half an hour, and she had to keep re-assuring whoever it was outside the door that she was fine, and still working at moving the boxes of soap, but eventually she managed to get the doorway clear. Aster picked up her bucket of fuses, all the light she had stolen from the enemy, and stepped out, not into darkness, but light. She blinked. Had someone found more fuses and put them back? But no. The electric lights on the ceiling were still dark. It was light because it was day. She must have been in the store room for hours, while the battle was fought and won, and someone finally thought to try and find out if she was alive, and where she was hidden. By the looks of the light, it was late afternoon, perhaps close to evening.

As if re-entering the world had caused her body to re-enter time, Aster was suddenly famished and parched, and had to pee. Badly. But there were things she had to do, first. She looked at the man who had rescued her. He was wearing an Army uniform, complete with the bat-winged cloak. She recognized him from the Underworld, but didn't really know his name. Not that it mattered.

"We won then?" She asked, though it wasn't really a question. If the Army of Darkness hadn't won, the man wouldn't even be here. He nodded.

"How did we do… were a lot of us… killed?"

"Hardly any!" The man actually seemed amazed by this. "Thanks to you. Once you got the lights out… they just panicked. The guards that were brave enough to come out in the dark were shooting wild. And after a few of them were killed, they tried running away. Some down the road, some back into the palace. None of the ones that ran down the road made it. We made damn sure of that, though it cost a few lives. But we couldn't have them getting to another radio somehow and alerting the Maestro. The ones who ran back… mostly dead once we got into the palace. A few surrendered. We locked them up in the Maestro's dungeons. We're still arguing over what to do with them."

Aster nodded. She handed the man the bucket of fuses. "Carry that. My hand hurts."

The man nodded, and seemed to see Aster's filthy, injured, and nearly naked state for the first time. He addressed her with whatever rudiments of respect he had learned in a rough world with little room for it. General Monroe's training had, by necessity, consisted mainly of fighting skills, not proper military decorum. "My Lady… Aster. You need a uniform. I mean… a hero like you… you shouldn't be seen that way. Not naked… or…err… dressed like one of the harlots the Maestro keeps around here, I mean. I mean… you deserve proper respect. For a hero."

Aster shook her head. She was no hero. She was rotten and lousy. A hero would have found a better way to win, without doing such horrible things.

"I haven't really worried about people seeing me for a long time now." She told the embarrassed man. "My uniform's in a bathroom somewhere. I'll get it pretty soon. But first show me where the battle was. Show me where the Army won."

She needed to know what she was responsible for. How many of the enemy were dead, besides just the two guards, because she had brought darkness into the world. And how many of her allies as well, because of mistakes that she maybe made that she couldn't even guess at.

The man next to her didn't understand her request, but he was no-one to refuse anything to a hero like Aster Aversa. He led her down the hall, to the throne room, which was filled with dead guards, and several finely dressed dead officials and sycophants of the Maestro who had somehow found the courage and foolishness to fight, rather than surrender. Or perhaps it wasn't courage. Those who surrendered, even if they weren't killed by the Army of Darkness, would likely be killed by the Maestro himself. A few of the dead were women, but not many.

"Where are the _Betties_?" Aster asked.

"The Maestro's whores?" Aster frowned, but nodded. The man made a disparaging noise, annoying Aster. She had been one, once, not so long ago. "They mostly ran away. We rounded them up. A few of them bit and slapped, but it didn't take much to overpower them. We've got them locked up in their tower. We're still arguing over what to do with them, too."

Fair enough. "Show me the rest." Aster ordered.

The man took her down several halls. Members of the Army of Darkness, wearing their complete uniforms, were walking and running back and forth on various errands. A few of them were surprised when they saw Aster, looking like a _Betty, _except that she was covered in blood and obviously not a prisoner. Then they recognized her. Or someone nearby told them who she was. Most of them smiled. A few gave her tentative salutes. A few of them seemed afraid. One of the last, a man, with dark tan skin and black hair made forked fingers at her and whispered under his breath: "Kali."

Aster did not like that. She was hardly an evil Hindu goddess. But she said nothing. And perhaps she was evil. She certainly didn't feel very good. Not a hero like the man who had found her claimed she was. Heroes were good and certain of themselves. Aster felt frightened and sad and guilty. She didn't want to know what she had done. But she needed to.

And she came to a frightening realization about herself. She was, perhaps, not that different from the Maestro, or from General Monroe, in desiring the honor given to gods. Not the _power_, such as those two wanted. Aster didn't really care much what other people did, beyond doing a job if she hired them to do it and leaving her alone otherwise.

But the _glory_… people admiring her… clapping for her… loving her. Well, that was a different story, wasn't it? Hadn't her dreams from earliest childhood always been of people visiting _her_ Zoo, and clapping for _her_ as much as for the animals?

She had always wanted it, the _glory_, though not the _power. _And perhaps that was no better than General Monroe, who wanted _power, _but didn't care what people thought of him so long as they did what he said. Or the Maestro, who wanted both, but although he had _power _in spades, had made himself far too hated to ever have anything like _glory. _In that, he was actually better off than Aster. At least he had some of what he wanted. Aster was not hated, but was far too peculiar, too skewed from the normal human way of thinking, for most people to ever give her the _glory, _the love and admiration she craved. But maybe it was better off that way. If she had as much _glory_ as the Maestro had _power_, who is to say she would not be just as bad? Hadn't the Queen Galadriel, in one of the books she had read said something like that? What had it been… "_All shall love me, and despair."_

Galadriel had turned down that much _glory_ in the book. As she had put it, she had faded, and gone into the west, and remained Galadriel. Which was much what Aster planned. She would enjoy the _glory_ while it lasted. But she would not try to make it last forever. She didn't know enough about how people thought to make it last forever, anyways, even if she had wanted to. And she didn't have a magical ring to make people give her love and _glory _forever. Besides Aster knew (and perhaps Queen Galadriel knew as well), that there would be something utterly unsatisfying about a _glory _that was magically compelled by a magical ring. Something fake. Aster may have wanted _glory_, wanted love, but she knew she would be completely unsatisfied with a fake _glory_, a fake love. She wanted it to be REAL. To be for her own virtues, for being who she was. For being a real person.

But who she was, she knew, inspired puzzlement and amusement from people far more than love and _glory._ And there was nothing she could do about it. Aster did not know what was wrong with her, different about her than other people. In fact, from her point of view, it often seemed to be other people who had something wrong with them. Certainly their craving for pointless power seemed insane to her. Well, so be it. She would take what few moments of real _glory, _of real love, she might get in her life. Such as now. It was worth ten million times more than power, or fake love.

So, like Galadiel she was going to fade, to leave Dystopia, and go into the west, to Wisconsin. And once there…

Well, perhaps there she would simply remain Aster Aversa. There were worse things that could happen.

But for the moment she would enjoy the glory, while she had it. At least it was real, and she couldn't resist the temptation. She followed the man who was leading her past where the various skirmishes of the battle had occurred, and basked in the admiration, pointed fingers, salutes, and whispers. The closer they got to the outside, the more dead guards there were. And the outside was littered with dead guards. Not only that, but the heads that had been on spikes were gone. Except one. Someone had knocked over the larger-than-life statue of the Maestro himself, carved from a single huge piece of green marble, that had been on a large pedestal in the courtyard, and tied the stone head on top of one of the spikes with rough cords. The eyes, real emeralds rather than just glass marbles, had been gouged out, leaving empty holes that reminded her of the guard she had thrown the acid into. But on the face of the Maestro, it looked good.

Aster regarded the dead enemies, and her worst nightmare's stony head put one one of his own spikes, and smiled narrowly. She thought about her father, and her sister, and the zoo animals. All dead. And the people thrown still alive into fires and the little bits of kids roasted on spits. She smiled wider, feeling like a female vampire again for a few moments. The only thing better would have been if it were the Maestro's head for real on the spike, instead of just a stone head, and his blood in her mouth.

The man who found her said nothing for several seconds, as Aster regarded the almost entirely one-sided carnage in the courtyard. "That's it, then. Except for a few that ran, and got shot down within a block or two."

"That's it then." Aster agreed. "I don't need to see them. I've seen enough."

The sun was going down, red light preceding the darkness that the Army lived in. That Aster lived in. Her smile was bloody and cruel, like the Hindu goddess the man had dubbed her. She thought about that small head in the bathroom sink, and a partial skeleton of a child's hand in the middle of a table. She nodded once, approving for the moment of what she had done. She raised one hand to the emerging night, and addressed it: "That's it then. What I've done. Good."


	31. Chapter 31

Chapter 31. The Spoils of War.

Shortly after assuring herself that the battle had, indeed, been won, Aster fetched her Army uniform out of the bathroom closet where she had left it, and put it back on. She had no underwear, but that didn't bother her. As soon as she was properly dressed, there was work to do. The actual fighting of a war was exciting, and either terrifying or fun depending on who you talked to, but once it had been won, you could not simply plop onto a bed and eat pastries and drink wine. No, what you had won had to be dealt with, one way or the other.

The first thing they had won, and the first thing that had to be dealt with, were the casualties. The dead ones. The living injured had already been taken care of, one way or the other. Triage dictated that once the battle had been won, the still-living members of the Army who could be saved, had to take priority over almost everything, including finding Aster, the Hero Who Had Made The Darkness. By the time someone had gone looking for her, the wounded had been mostly taken care of.

There were not that many badly injured, of course. Anyone badly enough injured in battle to threaten their lives, by definition could not move very quickly, and would most likely be killed. There was one man who had had half his hand blown off, and was missing his pinky and ring fingers, and part of the palm of his hand. It had been cauterized, and bound up with clean cloths, soaked in alchohol. The man was sitting on a mattress someone had dragged into the Maestro's throne room and had been given a bottle of liquor, but judging from the white color of his face, it was doing little for his pain. Aster shuddered. Suddenly the acid burns on her own hand didn't seem that bad. She cursed the Maestro and whatever gods or devils had brought all of them to such a state that even opium was becoming a rare luxury and wounds had to be treated without painkillers.

"Find one of the Maestro's _Betties _or other lap dogs with needle tracks on their arm." Aster suggested to an angry looking medic who was muttering something about the tendons in the injured man's ruined hand. "Make them tell you where they keep their stash. Beat it out of them, if you have to. This poor bastard is going to need it. Especially if you're going to try to re-attach the tendons to the ends of the bones."

The members of the Army who were only slightly hurt were for the most part tending to their own wounds, except if they were on parts of their bodies that were difficult to reach themselves. They were settled on couches and mattresses, with plenty of quilts and pillows, and given broth, milk, fruit, and liquor if they wanted it. A few of the injured members of the Army apparently were nauseous, judging from the contents of large bowls next to them.

There were not very many enemy wounded. The Army's victory had been so overwhelming, that most of the enemy had simply been slaughtered, cut down like wheat. Even some of the Maestro's guards who had tried to surrender, had been killed. Everyone in the Army had reasons for absolute hatred of the Maestro and anyone on his side, and after years of being starved, robbed, tortured, having their women raped to death and recently, their children eaten like cattle, very few had been inclined to show mercy or observe the niceties of what would have been the Laws of War from a more civilized time.

Most of the enemy wounded were either those who had run away or hidden instead of fighting, or who had done so after having been hurt. Nobody in the Army was inclined to waste time or supplies treating them. The ones who were worst hurt were lucky if they got an axe to the head. Several of them were not lucky and were tortured, kicked, and spat on for several minutes, before getting an axe to the head (as they were not deemed worthy of wasting an expensive bullet on), or simply dying of their own injuries. The enemies who were only slightly injured were also tormented, but not so badly, and were eventually taken off to be locked in the Maestro's dungeons, where they would be dealt with later, once it was decided what to do with them.

Having dealt with the living casualties, the Army now had to deal with the dead ones. Aster went outside and watched the efforts of several people who were busy retrieving the bodies of those who had been killed in the battle, and sorting through them. They were being placed in two piles. The few casualties from the Army of Darkness were placed on sheets, and respectfully wrapped up. Their enemies, the Maestro's guards, a few of his braver bureaucrats and sycophants, and some _Betties_ who had been unlucky or stupid enough to get in the way of the fighting were simply lined up on the bare cobblestones where most of the battle had taken place. At first they had been thrown in a heap, but Aster put a stop to that as soon as she saw what was going on, and had the bodies unpiled. It took more time and room, and some people grumbled under their breath at the inconvenience. But she wanted to see if Paul Rasse was among them.

She looked at the faces. Some were mutilated, having been shot in the head, or taken a blow from an axe or sword, but there was enough left of most of them that Aster was sure that if Rasse were among the dead, she would have recognized him. But no, he wasn't there.

She kicked at one of the enemy corpses in frustration.

"Where the fuck is he!" she snarled angrily at a young boy wearing an Army uniform. He looked like a boy, anyways, but in order to be in the Army, he must have been at least thirteen. Small for his age, then, like Aster had been. And had done nothing to deserve Aster's ire but be the nearest one to her. "Where the fuck in the seven hells is Paul Rasse?"

The hapless teenager shrugged. "I don't know who that is. But Daniel Wolfkiller wants to see you." He told Aster.

She frowned. She had no desire to see the surly horsemaster and failed to understand why he would want to see her.

"Well, you go tell him where I am. If he wants to see me so bad, he can come here." Aster adjusted her cloak as she glared at the corpses, perversely feeling that they were somehow hiding Rasse from her. "And tell him to find out if any of the prisoners know where Paul Rasse is. Because I want that bastard. If Rasse wasn't killed in battle, then I want him brought to me, alive. Because I want him to live. Live until he's suffered enough, and I say he dies. General Monroe promised me that. Do you hear me?"

"I'll tell him." The boy nodded vigorously. He was not going to argue with Aster, who was not only the Hero who had no doubt saved dozens of lives of the Army by getting the lights out, but was far taller and stronger than he was.

The boy ran off, and a few minutes later, Daniel Wolfkiller showed up where Aster was inspecting the remains of the head of one of the Maestro's dead guards, who had obviously caught a large caliber round in his face, and trying to decide if the hair color matched that of that raping son of a bitch, Paul Rasse. But no, it seemed a little darker.

"I need you to come and look at something." Daniel told her. She stood at attention and saluted, her status as a Hero among most of the army somehow making her take rank more seriously. And Wolfkiller outranked her.

"What is it?" Aster asked.

"Its…" the horsemaster's education in breaking horses, forging iron, hunting, and the stories of his people had not included the concepts he needed to describe the problem to Aster. "It's the Wardogs. In the kennels. I can't really explain it. I don't understand it myself. I need you to come and see."

Aster made a sour face, but followed Daniel Wolfkiller. On the way, he briefly explained to her how he had gone to the stables immediately after the battle, hoping to find any live horses that were of good enough stock to bring to their _destination _with them. He emphasized the word _destination. _So long as they were in the palace, where they might be overheard by spies, or even unknown devices that the Maestro might have hidden around and that might, perhaps, still be working even though the power was off, it was forbidden to mention any specific destination by name. No matter whether it be Wisconsin (where they actually were going), or Iceland (where they hoped to trick the Maestro into thinking they were going), or even the Magical Land of Oz. Mentioning anything might somehow give the Maestro a clue as to where they were going.

The horsemaster had found a few horses, but they were no better than the ones they had in the trucks, so he had shot them (unlike the enemy, the horses were deserving of the quick death of a bullet), and now had some old women butchering them for meat. He regretted killing perfectly good horses, but their orders were to destroy as much as they could, and horses were assets that they enemy could use against them, anyways. However, after shooting the horses, Wolfkiller had heard odd noises coming from the kennels, where the Wardogs were kept. That had made him realize something odd. The guards had not used any of the Wardogs in the battle, which made little sense from their point of view. Why wouldn't they have used them?

"So, I went to see what was going on in the kennels." The former horsemaster explained to Aster. "And I saw… well it's odd. I don't understand it. You've read all those books, and learned stuff from your father about animals. Back in the Zoo. So maybe you can take a look."

They got the kennels as Wolfkiller finished his story, and he swung open the gate for Aster, holding his rifle ready, in case one of the Wardogs attacked.

"Are they sick, do you think?" He asked Aster. She didn't answer at first. Very little about animals puzzled Aster but this did. What she saw behind the gates to the kennels was nothing she had seen or heard of before, or even read about, or had cause to expect.

"I'm not sure." She finally said. She looked from one Wardog to the other, her mind sorting through the symptoms they were showing, and the other evidence available. She could certainly see how they might appear to have an illness of some kind. They were all lying on their sides, and whimpering, and quivering slightly. But Aster couldn't recall any sort of animal disease that she knew of that had those sort of symptoms. Sometimes the last stages of rabies could be like that. And there were no more rabies shots, like there had been back before the War. But it really defied the odds that every single dog would come down with identical symptoms of the last stages of rabies all at the same time. And if they had had rabies, the guards certainly would have killed them far earlier. It almost seemed more like they had been drugged or poisoned. But that really didn't make any sense, either. Why would the Maestro's guards, or anyone in the Maestro's palace, try to incapacitate or kill the Wardogs right when they were most needed, when the palace was being attacked?

Of course, they weren't just dogs, though, were they? Aster could have smacked herself in the head. They had parts of machines attached to them. To their bodies, and even to their brains. They were… what was the word they had used in stories in books before the War.

Cyborgs.

Looked at from that point of view, the behavior of the Wardogs made far more sense.

"I think… I think we got a bit lucky." Aster said to Daniel Wolfkiller. "The Wardogs… they're not just dogs. They have machine parts in them. Computers. I think maybe the machine parts actually control them, and when I put the power out, it shut down whatever was controlling the Wardogs. A good thing, if the Maestro's guards had been able to use the Wardogs during the battle, it might have gone the other way. Or at least a lot more of us would have been killed."

"Can you fix it?" The Wardogs acted like they were almost in pain, and the horsemaster disliked seeing that.

"Fix it?' Aster snorted. "I don't even know how they were made, or what sort of crap the Maestro put in their heads. Much less how to get it out. It may not even be possible to get it out… it might not even have been _put_ into the dogs with surgery. It might have somehow grown in there. I don't know. I've read a few stories in old books about something called _nanotechnology._ Tiny machines, that you would need a microscope to see, that could be made to do _things_ inside a person or animal. I don't know if the stories were real or not. If they were real, it wasn't good. But it doesn't matter. I still can't fix it. And I think you need to make sure to shoot the Wardogs before they put the power back on in the palace. Once it goes back on, whatever's wrong with them now might fix itself, and they might attack us."

Wolfkiller nodded. He didn't understand what Aster had been talking about regarding _nanotechnology_, and wasn't sure if he believed it. Machines so small that you couldn't even see them struck him as nonsense along the lines of fairy magic or the more ludicrous religious cults that existed in and around Dystopia. He believed in things he could see and hold in his hand, like the iron horse shoes he made, or the Pre-War rifle he owned. Or the Wardogs. It really didn't matter diddly squat what was in their heads. Obviously _something_ had been done to them, as he could see the machine parts on the outside of them, and Aster's explanation as to why they were acting the way they were made sense, as did the necessity for killing them before the power was restored.

"I'll do it." He told her. "You don't need to watch."

"Use your rifle, not an axe." Aster said. She had gotten down on her knees, and was looking at the metal bits outside of one of the quivering Wardog's skulls, trying to see how it was attached to the flesh. "They were real dogs once, I think. When they were puppies. It's not their fault, what the Maestro did to them. Not like Paul Rasse. Where is that bastard, anyways? Has anyone found him? General Monroe promised me that the Army would try to take him alive. That I'd get my payback on him for what he did to me."

The large man sighed. He didn't want to waste the bullets, on Wardogs that would have gladly killed them, if they hadn't been so fortuitously disabled, but probably there were plenty of bullets somewhere in the Palace that he could use to renew his supply. And Aster was right. It really wasn't the dog's fault. They were only animals, not like that bastard Paul Rasse who had no doubt done things to Aster that Wolfkiller really didn't want to ask or think about. Which brought him to having to give Aster news that she didn't want to hear.

The erstwhile Zookeeper was down on her knees, looking in the mouth of one of the Wardogs, that she had opened with a large stick. What she hoped to see there, Daniel had no idea.

"Listen to me." He told her. "I know what you were promised. But you might not be able to get it. Everyone knows that you were promised Rasse. We asked the prisoners. Most of them claimed not to know where he is. The few who did know… they all said he's not here. That he went with the Maestro, to collect tribute. And they stuck to that story. Do you understand me?"

Aster said nothing. But her body tensed, and she breathed angrily through her nose.

"Look, I know you want to get even with him. I've got a score to even myself, with that green bastard. But we can't wait here for them. When Rasse gets back, the Maestro will be with him. He'll kill us all, if he catches us. We have to be gone, before that happens. Gone, with everything we're going to need to survive at our _destination._ So we need that mind of yours, to help us decide what to bring. That's what you need to concern yourself with."

Aster seemed distracted. She gazed into the eyes of the Wardog. It was like looking into a pitch black well. Was there still a dog in there, somewhere. The soul of the puppy it once had been, trapped by a malfunctioning machine that had been over-riding it's own brain for who knew how many years? Trapped in a cage far worse, and far more inescapable than the one the Maestro had put her in, back when she was only 14? Aster thought she saw a glimmer of it, deep in the bottom of those black, dilated, pupils.

"Do you understand me?" Wolfkiller said urgently. "You can't be worried about punishment for Paul Rasse."

Aster straightened up, seemingly having come to some conclusion or the other about the Wardogs. There was a distracted look to her. "I'm not worried about punishment for Paul Rasse."

"Good." He nodded, though he didn't quite understand Aster's sudden agreeableness to forget about the revenge she wanted. But then, who knew how the hell the brain of a monster like her worked? "Then go find General Monroe and help him decide what we should take with us out of the palace."

"I will." Aster nodded. "Just make sure to shoot the Wardogs. Use your rifle, like you promised."

Aster went back into the palace, trying to find General Monroe, and was informed that he was out in the courtyard. She went back out, the front way, and was greeted by the sight of members of the Army scurrying around the now mostly cleared area, bringing out any small flatbed trucks, wagons, sleds, bags or other such things that they had been able to find in the Maestro's palace. Some of them were heaped and filled with stuff, mainly food, and were being unloaded onto pallets in the courtyard. Except some of the better tasting food, which was being devoured. Empty vehicles, wagons, and other containers were being driven, pulled, or carried by excited members of the Army of Darkness back into the Palace. The proceedings were being overseen by General Monroe himself, despite his having being badly wounded in battle. He had a quilt wrapped around his shoulders, and was leaning on a couch that had been brought out for his comfort. It was obvious that he was shaky on his feet and really should have been sitting on the couch, but instead he was standing; shouting out orders and waving around his arms, and sending runners here and there on various errands, or to pass on verbal or written orders.

It was to be expected. After taking care of the living and the dead, which were necessary but unpleasant duties, about three hours after the battle had been won, the Army of Darkness finally got to enjoy the fruits of battle. The looting of objects. Everything in the Maestro's palace had to be stripped bare, of course.

They needed it _all._

What they didn't require for survival in Wisconsin, they _still _needed, simply in order to destroy it.

They did not dare take only what they required, and leave the rest. If the Maestro knew what they required, he might possibly figure out where they were going. Aster watched the loading for only a few moments, then when there was a pause in his series of orders, told General Monroe to make sure the power was not put back on until Daniel Wolfkiller had shot all the Wardogs. Then Aster tried to go into a long explanation as to the possible ways the Wardogs might have been created, and why it wasn't possible to remove the machine parts from them, but the General didn't understand most of what she said any more than Daniel Wolfkiller had. Nor did he care. He cut her off after only about fifteen seconds.

"Shut it, Zookeeper." He lowered the quilt slightly and rubbed his right arm with his left hand. There was a bloody rag around it. Probably a bullet graze. A deep one, judging from the amount of blood on the rag. "I get that we need to wait until the damn Wardogs are dead, before putting the fuses back. I was going to wait to do that anyways, until we were sure there were no guards hiding out anywhere in the palace. And I don't give a fuck how the damn things were made. If you want to dissect one, after Wolfkiller takes care of them, you can. I don't give a crap, as long as they can't hurt us anymore."

General Monroe snapped out some orders to someone regarding not putting the fuses back until he gave the order that they could be put back. Which would require not only that the Wardogs in the kennels be killed, but that the palace be completely searched to make sure there were no others somewhere inside that could pose a danger. Any battery operated lights or small vehicles with headlights were to be used to help search the otherwise dark palace in the meantime. Then he gave orders for the city of Dystopia to be searched by several small groups, and any radios found to be smashed, lest one of the people in Dystopia take it into their heads to try and contact the Maestro and tell him what had happened.

This probably wasn't all that likely, partly because most of the people in Dystopia hated and feared the Maestro so likely wouldn't want to either do any favors or draw his attention to them. And partly because the always paranoid Maestro used a nonstandard frequency for radio communications lest others listen in on them, meaning that it was likely that no radios except those in the Palace could broadcast or recieve on that frequency.

But it was still a possibility, and General Monroe believed in erring on the side of caution. The Army of Darkness may have defeated the Maestro's guards, but they didn't have a chance in hell against the Maestro himself. Nobody did. If the Maestro were seen returning by the watchmen that General Monroe had posted on several high points in the city, they would have to leave immediately. That probably meant that the Maestro would be able to follow them, and even if he couldn't, they would not have what they needed to survive at the _Destination. _Either way, they would be most likely doomed.

Once patrols were sent out to search for any radios, General Monroe sat down on a nearby couch that had been dragged into the courtyard for his personal comfort, and gave another order, for the strongest liquor they could find in the kitchens, preferably from the Maestro's private stock, because his damn arm was killing him, and the damn cancer was eating at his guts, and the noise was killing his head and he had had just about all he could take and if someone didn't get him some liquor pronto, he'd have them court martialled.

He looked up at Aster. "What the hell are you still doing here, Zookeeper? Unless you got liquor for me or want to put on a _tomato show_ for me, go make yourself useful. I'm in no condition to enjoy a damn _tomato _show anyways, and I got things to think about. And your damn yap makes my head hurt worse than it already does."

Not wanting to be around in case General Monroe got in the mood to start hanging people again, starting with her, Aster went back into the throne room, where, now that the army wounded had been treated, the last of the living enemies were in the process of being dealt with. These were the prisoners that had been taken during battle. The shackles that the Maestro had often used on his prisoners were fetched and put on their legs, then male prisoners were locked up in the dungeons and the _Betties_ confined to their own fairly luxurious tower.

There was a commotion, over near where the _Betties _were being grouped together, to have their legs shackled, before being locked in their own tower. Several male members of the Army of Darkness - and perversely enough, a few female members who must have been _ovoids _(or lesbians), after having had their fill of food and drink (though liquor was forbidden to all but the wounded under General Monroe's orders, as they needed the soldiers in the Army to be sober in order to hold and loot the palace as efficiently as possible) had decided that the _Betties _were rightfully part of the loot that they were entitled to, as victors of the battle. They had ripped the clothes off of several crying _Betties,_ and were about to engage in the time honored practice of victorious soldiers everywhere, and enjoy raping the women they had won as spoils.

Aster looked at this for a moment, thinking about Queen Galadriel and Gandalf from the book she had read, a long time ago. They had not dared to take the Ring of Power. It would have made them as bad as Sauron. She shook her head. What good was their victory in taking the Palace if the first thing they did was step into the Maestro's shoes? And then inevitably to become little Maestroes themselves, ruling as tyrants in Wisconsin. And they would have the means to do just that. There were already several pallets loaded with weapons.

Aster bit her lip, her heart pounding just as it did every time she drove her truck, or as it had only the previous night, when she had climbed a rope to a terrifying height. She could feel her new dreams for the future being snatched away from her by the imminent rape of others, as surely as her old dreams had been snatched away from her by the Maestro's rape of herself.

Not good. Now she was going to have to do something _stupid_ that she was not at all inclined to do. She was no Hero. But she had to do it. Because as frightened as she was at the thought of doing it, she was even more frightened at the thought of what would happen if she _didn't _do it.

Just as she had the previous night, to give herself courage, Aster imagined that she were a strong, feral, female _Vampire. _One set on pure killing, without the disguise of seduction. She bared imaginary fangs, pushed her cloak back over her shoulders, so that the bat-shaped pin, unique among the women of the army, was easily seen, and drew her _Taurus _gun. She stepped over to the nearest man who was groping the breasts of one of the _Betties, _put the barrel of the gun behind his ear, and pulled the hammer back, slowly.

"I can hit your head from halfway across this throne room." Aster said in a deliberately cold voice. "But there's people in the way."

"What the hell…?!" Being interrupted was the LAST thing the man had expected. Especially by someone in the Army. And particularly especially, perhaps, by the normally overly shy Zookeeper.

Who, sadly for him, was now the Hero Who Had Made the Darkness. Also known as (depending on which stories real or otherwise people had heard about her) the Zookeeper; The Only Bitch the Maestro Ever Bowed To; The Alpha and the Omega; and Kali.

The man realized, rather wisely, that there was no way to fight a story. He could kill Aster Aversa, the person, perhaps, but after how she had saved the Army by Making the Darkness, he would simply be committing suicide in a rather painful fashion. The other members of the Army would rip him apart.

"Zookeeper…" the man spread his hands to show that he had no weapon. "Is there a problem?"

"Yes." Aster lowered her gun slightly and decided to use a far more terrible weapon. She fixed each man and woman in the crowd with icy eyes, forcing them to turn away just like the animals turned away from Mowgli, and when the last one looked down she roared in a loud voice, trying to imitate the roaring of the tigers that had once been at the Zoo.

"SHAME ON YOU!"

"Shame on all of you!" The darkness in her face was worse than the darkness she had made in the palace. Or perhaps, a few of the would-be rapists thought to themselves, it was the _source_ of the darkness she had made in the palace. Many of them more than half-believed in magic, and if it existed, surely a Hero like Aster would have it.

"What… just what the hell do you think you are doing!?" There was a tone to her voice as if she were genuinely puzzled. "You prove yourselves last night to be part of the Army of Darkness, the best Army that there is, the only ones who have ever taken the Maestro's Palace. You kill or capture every last one of his guards and officials. And now? Now what do you do? You step into their shoes and decide to be every bit as rotten as they are?"

"But…" One of the men protested slightly. But Aster had already figured someone would do that, and was prepared.

"But…but… but…" She sneered. "But what? Real soldiers attack enemies. Not helpless women. What do you think you're doing? Who do you think these women are?"

She let them think about that for a moment. "Maybe you've forgotten already. Maybe now that you're part of the Army of Darkness, maybe you've just conveniently forgotten how things were before you were a member, and why you joined the Army. Maybe you've forgotten how the Maestro used to take… to steal… your daughters… your sisters…your wives…even your mothers."

She fixed her eyes on the members of the groups who were of different genders and ages in turn. Even the _ovoids_, who would still have female relatives or even 'wives' that the Maestro could have taken to be one of his _Betties_.

"So, now you're just going to go and rape these women, because you figure they're part of the loot we've won. Like the beds and food and hot baths. Time to enjoy yourselves. Time to rape your own children. Or if they aren't yours… they're _someone's_ children. Or _someone's_ wives. What would you want them to do with YOUR children, if things were different, and they were the ones who had won a battle? Hell, less than a year ago, I was one of them. Would you have raped me?!"

At the mention that she had been one of them, a few of the _Betties_ finally recognized Aster.

'_The Murderer'_. She saw one of them mouth silently, her face white with fear. They had not treated Aster well during her time in the Maestro's palace, and feared that she was sparing them from being raped only so that she could do something far worse to them herself, now that she seemed to have a lot of power within the ranks of the Army that had just captured them. A few of them pointed at her with trembling fingers. But none of them said anything out loud.

"Think about what you're doing." Aster told them. "And what it's going to be like, afterwards? I mean, how long, really, is it going to feel good, if you rape these women? A few seconds? A few minutes? The Maestro pretty much ruined me for ever having sex, so I don't really know, and the books I've read don't tell me much. Maybe one of you can tell me. But it can't be all that long, because from what I've seen of men, after having sex, in a day or two, they want it as badly as they did before."

"But I'll tell you what will last a long time." Aster said. "Knowing what you've done. That you're a rapist, and that you've turned the Army of Darkness from noble fighters for our children and the human race into a just another selfish band of robbers and rapists. Because I promise you, if you do this thing, you will NEVER be able to forget that you are a rapist. A _Monster!_"

It was a terrible, unmerciful trick on the human mind, that Aster played. And she played it deliberately. She knew that the best way to guarantee that someone would never be able to forget something, to stop thinking of something, was to try to get them to actively NOT think about it. It was an old tavern game, from before the War. She and Thumb had sometimes played it on each other, when they were in a mood for jokes.

_I'll give you a million dollars if you don't think about a pink elephant for the next ten minutes. Oops, sorry, you lose._

"You'll never be able to forget it." Aster drove the point of her weapon in deeper. "And it will poison the rest of your life. You may someday get married, have children. How will you tell your wife or son or daughter that you are nothing but a raping monster? Or will you just keep it a secret, and know in your heart that you don't deserve any of your family or life? That it's all a lie? That it's hollow and rotten inside like a bad egg?"

"So…" The would be rapists seemed more confused than anything now. "What should we do…?"

It wasn't clear as to whether he was asking what they should do with themselves, or the women. Aster addressed both possibilities.

"Put the women in the tower, which is what you were _ordered _to do." Aster drove her weapon deeper, pushed by the knowledge that they had not followed their orders like proper members of the Army of Darkness. "But if any of them want to be with one of you, and come with us to our _Destination_, of their own free will, they can. But as free women, not slaves like the Maestro has made them. Otherwise, put them in the tower and give them something to eat and drink. Then, if you want to enjoy yourselves, there are decent ways to do it. There's plenty of food and baths and soft beds here. And there's women in the army. Or your hand."

But from the sound of it, Aster had shamed most of the men out of wanting sex at all, at least for the present time. The _Betties _were made to line up, to be marched off to their tower. Several of them were glancing nervously at Aster. They had not been nice to her when she had been one of them, and anyone who could make a large group of rapists back down from their intentions was probably to be greatly feared by anyone with any sense. Because the only other person they knew who could do that was the Maestro himself.

As the _Betties _were marched off, the rest of the would-be rapists went back to their proper duties, which was mainly helping to loot the palace. A few ovoids were muttering something Aster didn't quite grasp. In fact, she hadn't understood what they were doing with the male rapists in the first place, as a woman really couldn't get off that way the way a man could. But it seemed that their goal was either to prove that they were just like a man, or that they were somehow stronger and better than the _Betties_ were. Both of those reasons made little sense to Aster and simply proved to her that the women involved were idiots, since the first one was absurd, like a raven trying to prove that it was just like an elephant, and the second one would have been better proven by the ovoids getting into a fight or race with the _Betties_ rather than trying to rape them.

But then, people had never made much sense to Aster. Any more than she made sense to most of them.

Just then, there was a commotion by the entrance to the throne room. Several people began shouting, and Aster heard the sound of motors from outside the palace. Were there more guards coming?! Aster drew her gun and ran out of the throne room, down the hallway, and out the main doors of the Palace.

Then she laughed. The motors were from the trucks. The ones with their children in them. The runner General Monroe had sent to inform them that the battle had been won had reached them, and now they had come, so that the trucks could be loaded with all the things they would need to keep themselves and their children alive in Wisconsin.

She holstered her gun, as the children ran out, and were greeted by their parents. A few of them were actually the would-be rapists that Aster had shamed out of their intentions. One of them saw Aster, standing by herself. He looked at the young girl, perhaps four or five years old, that was hugging his leg, then looked at Aster again.

"Thank you." Aster saw him mouth. She couldn't hear the words, with all the excited shouting of the re-united families. Because it was for this, this moment, that they had all faced the terror of the previous night, and it was the lives of their children that were their true prize, even more than the loot to be taken from the palace.

At least for the others. Not for Aster. She had no children, and never would. And her prize, if she could get it, still lay unimaginably far away both in distance and in time.

She shook the cold thought away. Thinking about it was like gazing into the abyss of the stars at night, or that well of darkness she had seen in the Wardog's eyes. Any light, unimaginably far away. She might be part of the Army of Darkness, but thinking about that sort of darkness, too much, was a quick route to madness.

Besides, there was food to eat. Meat and bread and cider and fruits and cakes and pies and all the hot baths and perfumed soap she wanted. At least for the next few days. And she had saved a lot of people. They were worth saving, as much as any animal species, she supposed.

She thought about the contents of the palace. Her eyes closed as she concentrated. There were things in it that -out of all the members of the Army of Darkness - only she knew about, and that only she could use. She thought about them, arranging them in her head like the pieces of an incredibly complex jigsaw puzzle, until the sort of picture she wanted… no, the sort of _future_ she wanted took form.

Aster smiled and nodded to herself. Yes, there were spoils worth taking, even for her.


	32. Chapter 32

Chapter 32. The Right Bait

With the Palace now well and truly in the hands of the Army of Darkness, and with the most pressing matters of the prisoners and searching out any radios in Dystopia taken care of, the next order of business was tending to the _Maestro's _prisoners, who were milling around in confusion, after having been freed from the dungeons (which were then refilled with the prisoners taken by the Army of Darkness. They were in sad condition. Most were starved, covered with unspeakable things (there were no toilets, or even chamber pots in the dungeons), had fleas, ticks, and other parasites, and more than a few had been tortured. They had to be tended to, given medical treatment, deloused, and fed. Nor were they reassured by the dark uniforms or the name of the Army of Darkness, and it took a while to convince them that they had not traded one form of slavery for another before they would cooperate with any of it.

None of it went easily. It seemed that every problem that needed to be solved first required that at least two other problems be solved first, and once it had been solved, created at least two other problems to be solved afterwards, as well. For instance, the medical inspections could not be carried out in the dim interior of the palace, and a runner had to be sent to replace the fuses Aster had removed, earning her glares from the freed prisoners when they heard she was the one who had Made the Darkness, as if she had done it specifically to frighten and inconvenience them.

Then, there was screaming from several of them when their clothes were taken to be burned, and they had to be given new clothes before they were re-assured that the removal of their clothes was not intended to be a prelude to a rape of some kind. The clothes were also a problem, since almost all the clothing available in the palace was _green, _and the Maestro's former prisoners were reluctant to wear the colors of their enemy. Eventually, they accepted the idea, for lack of any alternative other than wearing a burlap sack.

Nor were the results of the medical examinations entirely optimistic in some cases. Weeks of starvation, filth, and infestation by parasites had caused bad infection in some of them. The antibiotics that could have easily treated it didn't exist any more. All that could be done was to clean the infections as well as possible, lance them, and in some cases, cauterize them with a hot iron. As there were no anesthetics either, this brought on more screams, especially from the children who were convinced they were being tortured by the Army. A few of the younger ones had to be strapped down. Aster watched it, clenching her fists until she thought her fingers would dig into her palms. The smell and screams reminded her of when the Maestro had bodily thrown people into his fireplace. And now the Army she had joined was performing the same burning of flesh, even if it was on a smaller scale and for a good reason. It hurt her then and it hurt her now. And in a way, it was _worse. _Partly because it was her and the Army she had joined doing it, partly because of the meager and disgusting rations they had had for so long. She was just so _hungry_ and the burned flesh smelled like _BACON! _and she couldn't help salivating. She cursed the Maestro under her breath for bringing her and the rest of the Army to such desperate straits. She hated seeing it, and she _liked_ hating it. She intended to see the Maestro dead someday, if she could, and when the time came, she didn't want a single shred of mercy in her heart to stop her.

It seemed to take forever, but it was really less than an hour until the screaming of those who had had to have infections cauterized died down to a whimper. However, after being sat down at a long table in the Maestro's dining room, a far greater number of them began screaming at Aster when she directed that they be given nothing more than thin soup, and not much of that, either.

"I haven't eaten in WEEKS!" a woman shrieked, glaring first at Aster, then at the overhead lights. It was more light than she had seen since she had been imprisoned, and her eyes were having trouble adjusting due to vitamin deficiency. "And how can you deny decent food to starving CHILDREN?! Don't tell me you don't have food, I can see a bunch of you bat-faced lot over at the other table stuffing your faces." Several conversations between both the former prisoners, and the members of the Army that had freed them were silenced, and heads turned to look at her. It was, perhaps, not so much her shrieking, as her insult toward the uniform they had _earned._

Aster was out of patience for stupidity. "It's _dangerous _to eat too quickly after you've been starved." She told the woman. "My father told me that. The shock can kill you."

"Your father? Who the fuck was he?"

"Joshua Aversa."

The woman seemed to search her memory. "The zookeeper? What's a damn animal keeper know? Damn lackey of the Maestro's, if you ask me. And the zoo's gone, anyways. Has been for a years, now." She waved the thought of the Zoo, and anything that an animal keeper might have known away with a disparaging gesture.

"He knew a hell of a lot more than you do, apparently." Aster said, feeling like dumping the bowl of soup onto the woman's head for the rude comments she had made about her father and the Zoo. "Now, you can eat the soup, or you can eat nothing. It's your choice."

Nobody chose to eat the nothing. They sat down to soup, and Aster only then remembered that she had a promise to keep to herself.

"Is there anyone here by the last name of 'Black'?" Aster asked the freed prisoners. "Anyone whose husband or father was a man called 'Frederick Black'?"

There was no response for a several long seconds, and more than a few of the prisoners looked at her as though the question were a trick of some kind. Finally, a brown haired boy, his hair close to Aster's in color, and perhaps 6 years old raised his hand.

"He was my pa." The boy said. He pointed to a girl next to him, who was a year or two younger, and holding her bowl of soup in her hands in order to sip at it, rather than using a spoon. "Mine and my sis's both. Do you know where he is?"

"He's… dead." Aster did not want to tell him that the leader of the Army of Darkness, General Monroe, had hung their father for spying. Not yet. They would find out soon enough. Let them get a little strength from the soup, first. "Where's your mother?"

The boy shook his head. "Don't know. The Maestro took her away… I don't remember how long ago. She never came back. Do you think she's in the palace somewhere? She was pretty. I heard the Maestro had pretty lady servants around here."

_Servants. _Now there was a euphemism if Aster ever heard one. But if the boy's mother had been alive, and among the _Betties_ somewhere, surely she would have asked about her children, once the Army of Darkness had taken over the palace. And she would have tried to see her children or get a message to them, even before then.

"I don't think… she's probably dead." Aster did not know a very polite way to put such a horrible subject before children. Diplomacy was not her strong point. The most she could do was to refrain from mentioning the horrible way their mother had probably died.

"No!" The boy looked as stricken as if he had been condemned to death, and hugged his sister. It was probably a realistic assessment of the situation. The chances of survival of young orphans in the post-War world was not good. And the things many of them had to do to survive were so unpleasant that in some ways they might have been better off dead. And she had no idea how to approach the subject that she was part of the Army that had killed their father. They were a pathetic sight. The clothing they had been given was far too large for them, especially as they were practically nothing but skin and bones, and the girl had finished her soup and was looking around with big eyes for seconds that she would not be given for at least another hour or two. Their skin was pale from lack of sunlight, and starvation. They looked like ghosts, in oversized green garments. As if the Maestro had already killed them, and they didn't realize they were dead.

Aster wondered if their father, Frederick, had been told by the Maestro, or guessed, that his children would not be fed unless and until he brought back information about the Army of Darkness. And whether he had actually believed that he could save his children, or whether he thought that the most he could get for them was a quick and painless death.

There was a pain in her chest, of feelings that wouldn't quite lend themselves to examination, like the minnows in the ponds at the zoo that had always darted out of her hand, the very moment before she thought she had caught them. _Not this time. _She thought. The boy's father, Frederick Black, was a spy against the Army of Darkness, but he had done that only because the Maestro had held his family as hostage. And the damned green bastard had raped Black's wife to death, regardless. Probably he would have raped the girl, too, if she had been eight or ten years older. So perhaps the children's parents had paid with their blood for the lives of their children. It was a price… a bait… Aster could not refuse. Even though she wasn't at all sure she could take on more burdens than she already had.

"Alright." Aster said. She spoke loudly so that others would be sure to hear her. "Your mother and father are dead, but I won't leave you alone. They were brave people, so you'll grow up to be brave like them. From now on, you're _my_ children. There's a lot of things I have to do, so I'll be busy a lot, but I'll see to it that you're taken care of. You'll get food, and clothes, and a bed. And I'll teach you how to find your own food. And I own things, so even if I die, you can trade them to get the food and stuff you need. Ok?"

The boy nodded silently.

"What's your name? And your sister's?"

"I'm Zack. And my sister is Michelle. Please… can't we have more than soup? It's yucky and we're hungry. Can't we have hams and bread and pies like you Army people?" He pointed at a table several feet away where cold food had been brought out, not understanding that although the Army had been on short rations, and eaten disgusting things like rats and bugs the past several weeks, they were not dangerous starved like the Maestro's former prisoners. All he understood was hunger, and that he saw food and was being denied it. At only 6, he could not understand, and his brown eyes held a glint of a feral, starving animal.

"Zachariah?" The boy nodded. Zack Black. Cute. His father might have been a spy, but had at least had a sense of humor. Or no sense at all. Aster took off her bat shaped cloak and handed it to him. "You wear this. It's big, but it will show people you're part of the Army of Darkness now. Since I'm in the Army, and you're under my protection, that makes you and your sister both part of the Army. I have things to do, but you wear that so I can find you again. And right now I know you don't understand, but I'm afraid you have to eat only soup, until you get stronger. You'll get the same food as the people in the Army do in a few days or weeks, I promise. I'm sorry you can't have it now, but you tell people that Aster Aversa said you and Michelle were to get a good bed, ok?"

The boy nodded. Aster wished she could have stayed with him, and had mixed feelings about her decision to adopt him. The things she would be doing in her life would be dangerous, and if she died, or got into trouble for the things she had to do, then where would the boy and his sister be?

_No worse off than they are now._ She decided. And in a sense, perhaps the boy _could _have been her son. The age he was, 6 years or so, he might very well have been conceived the very night she had been raped by the Maestro. The night she lost… the night the Maestro _stole_ from her any children she might have ever had.

Aster leaned against the wall, weary with exhaustion. She couldn't even spare the time to talk any more with the two children, or think of a polite way to explain that the Army of Darkness had hung their father as a spy. With the Maestro's former prisoners being taken care of, what Aster wanted more than anything was a nice long bath. With hot water and some of the Pre-War soap she had seen. Then a change of water. Then another bath. Then all the food she could think of and eat. Despite his cannibalistic habits, the Maestro had a pantry filled with what amounted to riches to the famished Army of Darkness. Turkeys. Chickens. Sides of beef, pork, venison, mutton, and goat. Cooked to tender perfection and served piping hot with salt and exotic herbs from the Maestro's greenhouses. Canned fruits and vegetables. Warm bread and cakes and pies. Aster drooled to think of it. Then once she was full, a nice long sleep of at least 15 hours.

What she and everyone else got, unfortunately, was a 5 minute shower (though they did at least get the nice looking Pre-War soap), and food served cold, and eaten on the run. The latter being the 'stuffing of faces' that the starving woman had expressed her jealousy of, and that had been denied to children such as Zack and Michelle who were too young to understand why.

It was disappointing. Aster supposed that everyone else in the Army, like she did, had had a somewhat childish mental vision of being rewarded for taking the palace by (once they had also secured the city, made sure their children were safe, and other immediate tasks accomplished) being able to spend at least a few days in the same sort of luxury as the Maestro and his sycophants lived in. With said sycophants being made to serve them as slaves at least for cooking and bringing food and scrubbing them in the baths.

But of course, except for those who were wounded too badly to work, they couldn't. As General Monroe pointed out irately, when he found most of the Army, including Aster, sitting around and stuffing their faces with fruit and nut pies, they were on a SCHEDULE.

And unfortunately, it wasn't their schedule. They had no way of knowing when the Maestro would get back. They didn't expect him back for over a week, but the Maestro was mad, and hence unpredictable. For all they knew, he was on his way back at that very moment. They had no time to waste wallowing in luxury and doing nothing productive.

It was because they had no time to waste that General Monroe grew irate when he heard about those members of the Army who had planned to rape the Maestro's _Betties. _If they had no time for hot food or long sleep, they sure as hell didn't have time for sex. Besides which, he had specifically ordered that the _Betties_ be locked in their tower. Raping them was not part what he had ordered them to do. And how many times did he have to tell them to follow the Orders they were given, no more and no less, and not adding creative (or rather, disobedient) embellishments of their own?

He also asked them why they didn't actually complete their rape of the _Betties_, and was told what Aster had done to stop them. This made him squint at Aster with something like angry suspicion for nearly a minute, but he said nothing.

Aster posed a problem that the General, determined to create a dynasty for his children, did not like. He could not simply assassinate her, or arrange an accident. Not after the things she had done. She was a hero. Even though she was dangerous. Or would have been dangerous, if she were anything resembling sane. There were things going on in her head that - he had to admit to herself - were nearly as far beyond his own capacity as the Maestro's strength was. Look at the way she had faced down several times her own number, when they had intended to rape the _Betties. _With a single gun, or more likely, the words she had spoken to them, she had stopped a mob of would-be rapists in their tracks. It was the power of _leadership. _Of _Kings._

And then what had she done with it? Made herself Queen or gotten a promotion, at least? As anyone else would have?

No. Aster had done nothing. Once she had accomplished the immediate goal of stopping the other soldiers from doing something she found highly offensive, she simply set the power down, like a tool she was done with, and gone on to other things she found more interesting.

Not that what she had done wasn't bad enough. Though he could not say so, Monroe actually would have preferred that the mob had carried out the rape of the _Betties_, and that nobody had stopped them. It would have tarred his whole army with the brush of guilt, and guilty people were easier to control. To _rule, _as he intended his children to. Once people had blood or other guilt on their hands, they were caught in a moral trap, in which they and the powers they served _had _to be right. Right, regardless of any wrongs that were done. Otherwise they would have to face their own guilt, which few people had the strength to do. Aster had kept his army out of that trap, which he could have used for his children. And her informal adoption of the children of the spy he had executed had further undermined the sort of authority he would have liked to have given Evan and Gina. Perhaps now they would still rule, but not as thoroughly as he wanted. Still, perhaps it was better this way. Aster's way. The path she had made meant his children might be deposed, if others did not like their rulership, but they probably would at least not be hung.

Besides, Aster was not really all that dangerous, but she was, perhaps, useful. Monroe wasn't sure if Aster would actually keep the children. The Zookeeper was very young, and might get tired of them. But it did send a useful message. _The Army delivers what the Maestro only promises. _Useful enough that Monroe would have to see to it that someone else would care for the two children, if the Zookeeper did get tired of them. They were at least old enough to eat and go to the bathroom by themselves. A few scraps of food and a warm bed wouldn't cost that much, and would make the Army look good, and perhaps more importantly, give them pride.

And as annoying as her stopping of the rape of the _Betties_ might have been, it had taught General Monroe a valuable lesson. A few words, the right thought, at the right time, could give a King, or even a mad would-be Zookeeper more power than the strongest army in the world. It was, perhaps, why he himself now found himself in charge of an Army, and the beginnings of a new nation, rather than a ragged band of robbers. Because others had believed his words of a new start, somewhere else, away from the Maestro. It was a lesson his children could use. He would see to it, as best as he could before the end, that they would learn the art of words from Aster, and the art of War and rulership from others.

The fact that words ruled thoughts, and thoughts ruled what a man did, and that this would, in effect, give Aster Aversa the rulership he sought for his children did not occur to him at that time, though it eventually would. But by then it would be too late for him to do anything about it.

In the meantime, as the commanding officer of the Army, he had to deal with the would-be rapists. The offending soldiers (both men and women) were sentenced to five lashes each, with the whip. Then the sentence was suspended, on the grounds that the whipping would slow them down even further than their stupidity already had, and the offenders were instead denied the hot showers that the rest of the Army got, and was allowed to eat only meat, vegetables, bread, and water. They were not to get any fruits, cakes, or pies, and once they had eaten about half of what was on their plates, they were told they had had enough and General Monroe set them to the grueling labor of shoveling and bagging up wheat, rye, corn, and other grains from several silos that were set on one side of the palace.

The rest of the Army got 30 minutes to eat as much as they could, then drank thick coffee. At least they called it 'coffee'. It was actually chicory root. Coffee came from South America, and was not available in Dystopia. Not for any price, in money or blood. Not even for the Maestro himself. Aster heard that the Maestro had once grown it, a long time ago, in his palace greenhouses, but it had died out long before she had been born. Like so many other things. The Heroes. The Zoo animals. Her family. Plague and lack of genetic variety were killing much of what had managed to survive the War, and the Maestro seemed likely to kill everything else.

Once the Army was scrubbed and fed, and given energy by the fake chicory-coffee, it was time to get back to work.

The younger children of the Army members, those under 5, were put into a room full with the few toys they had, and plenty of blankets, in case they wanted to sleep. The former prisoners, being too weak with hunger and the effects of beatings and torture were put in a different room on mats and given blankets (except for Zack and Michelle, who, having been adopted by Aster, were allowed to join the other children of Army members). Everyone else was assigned tasks, either loading the trucks, or deciding what was to be loaded, or doing support work for those in the first two categories. The old men and women were sent to the kitchen to prepare food, or to the trucks to write an 'inventory' of what was being loaded, and the older children were set to work running food to the hungry soldiers in the Army and relaying written messages back and forth.

There were tanks of diesel fuel in the basement. One of General Monroe's first orders was to connect hoses to them, so that the fuel could be pumped into the courtyard. Things they didn't want or couldn't use were burned, or if they were inflammable, were loaded onto the trucks (which had driven into Dystopia as soon as a runner had informed them of the victory), and then driven a few minutes to the harbor, where they were dumped into the ocean. Some of it the Maestro probably would be able to salvage. Others items would be lost forever. One of the latter was salt.

General Monroe had sent most of the members of the Army of Darkness to load as much food, weapons, and hand tools onto the trucks as they could find, and to destroy anything they were sure wouldn't be useful. Knowing that Aster had read far more books than anyone else, he told them to consult with her if they were in doubt as to whether something would be 'useful' at their _destination _or not. Then he told Aster to look around the palace for anything unusual, special treasures of the Maestro, that they might be able to use, and if she found any, to put it on the trucks. And if she needed help, everyone else had standing orders to load whatever she told them to load, regardless of whether they understood _why _or not.

The first thing that Aster wanted to get, if she could, was knowledge. Aster had a very hard time understanding or using political or social power. To her, _knowledge_ was power. And she needed as much of it as she could get, if she were to achieve the small possibility of success, in the far future, that she had worked out. And she didn't have anywhere near the amount of _knowledge, _of _power_, that she would need. There was so much she needed to know that she didn't. And much she needed to _have_ that she didn't. But in Aster's scheme of priorities, knowledge came first before material goods. After all, goods could be stolen, but how could anyone steal what was in her head?

Accordingly, after checking on Zack and Michelle, to make sure they had been given the good bed and blankets she had promised. They had the blanket, but were rolled in her bat-wing shaped cloak under it, which made Aster smile. She felt naked without the adornment, but took the silver, bat-shaped pin off it and fastened it to her shirt, justifying it with the thought that it might possibly poke them in their sleep. Then she patted them on the head and let them know she was going to be busy for the next several hours. That done, she made her way into what was left of Dr. Llewellyn's office, to sort through his books.

Most of them, she decided, were useless. They detailed surgical techniques that required complex tools that in the Post-War world probably existed only in Iceland and Dystopia. And likely, they would not exist in Dystopia for much longer. Things were falling apart. Nineteenth century medical texts would have been of more use to her.

She did take the copy of 'Fundamentals of Biochemistry' by Dr. Michael Morbius, smiling slightly at the sight of the moustache she had scrawled on his face so many years ago. She had been young, then. It seemed a lifetime ago.

Then of course there was a set of encyclopedias. She did not take them, even a century after the War there were probably still encyclopedias to be found in Wisconsin if they looked hard enough, but she did look up the entry for that state in the W-Z volume. She wanted to know if there was anything they had in the palace that they didn't have in Wisconsin. And she found it.

The right bait.

Or part of it. There were other parts, that would come soon enough.

And it helped that it was all true. She felt slightly ashamed at the trap she was making for General Monroe, but it wasn't as if she were going to _hurt_ him, or anyone else. Or even make them worse off than they were before. In fact (she justified the matter to herself), she was actually going to make him better off. It was hardly her fault that Monroe would never let her have what she needed. Not if he knew about it. So she had to give him other things, things that she didn't need, in order to distract him.

She took the encyclopedia back up to the courtyard, where General Monroe was burning pots of orange tree saplings from the greenhouses. She waited, in the proper posture of attention, until he turned to her.

"Well, Zookeeper." He seemed actually slightly respectful, which was probably about as friendly as he ever got with anyone other than his own two children. Though he still squinted slightly in suspicion. Aster wasn't sure what to make of that, but she didn't like it. He glanced at the two thick volumes she carried. "More books. What a shock. Learn anything useful?"

"Salt." Aster said bluntly. It was her first bit of bait. It was not the last.

The General frowned. "Are the cooks having _another_ problem of some kind?" The earlier problem he referred to had been the matter of a half dozen gutted human corpses that had been found hung in the large freezer where the meat was kept. They had been cut down and put with the dead Army soldiers. He folded his good arm over his chest, his expression suggesting that now that the matter of the Maestro's cannibalistic habits had been taken care of, nobody in his army had better be having a problem with something as simple as getting meals prepared in an entire palace full to the brim with tons of food.

"No." Aster waved the encyclopedia. "I looked up… our _destination _in the encyclopedia. To see if I could learn anything that the Millers and other people there hadn't told us. And there's no _salt_ there. Or at least not very much, not enough to mention in the encyclopedia. And salt is important. You need at least some to live. And a lot to salt down meat and make soap and leather and God only knows how many other things. We've got tons of it here, from the ocean. We should load some on the trucks. Trade goods. The carrot is always better than the stick. The more goodies we have to offer the people living there to buy our way in there, and the less threatening we have to do, the easier a time we'll have of it."

"Hmm." General Monroe considered the idea. "You're sure about this? The stuff is heavy. I don't want to end up with nothing to eat but salt in a few months, because we took that and left wheat behind."

Aster waved the encyclopedia. "You can look at it for yourself. I can't really see any reason for a Pre-War encyclopedia to lie. And from what the Millers and other people from our _destination_ say, there's plenty of fish, and game and wild plants there to be eaten. Especially the _Helianthus Morbiusii. _Which I'm pretty damn sure we _better_ eat, regardless."

The _Helianthus Morbiusii (_or blood sunflower as the people from Wisconsin called it, though whether this was because of the red color it had or because it had been created by a _Vampire _they didn't seem to know) was the genetically engineered sunflower that had been the topic of a great many discussions between Aster and the higher officers in the Army of Darkness, including General Monroe and Daniel Wolfkiller. Somehow, it cured radiation. Both in the land, and in the people who ate it. It was why the people in Wisconsin survived.

It was why Morbius, the _Vampire_, survived. Like the vampire bat, he was an obligate hematophage. He had to drink blood. And unfortunately, unlike the vampire bat, not just any old sort of blood would do. It had to be human blood. The _Vampire _needed the human species to survive, or he would starve. What he had done was clever, and Aster admired clever people. He had ensured the survival of both humanity and himself. True, he killed people, which Aster could not advocate and certainly intended to put a stop to, but it was still clever.

And then, apparently, several years after the War, something had gone badly wrong, and he had gone mad. Or perhaps a better word would be _feral, _since the behavior described by the people from Wisconsin was more like that of a wild animal, than a sadistic madman like the Maestro. What had gone wrong, Aster didn't know. The people from Wisconsin were uniformly evasive on many of the details about the _Vampire, _which Aster didn't like. Surprises were for birthday and Christmas presents, not for things affecting her own survival. But asking them about it simply got nothing but either silence and guilty looks, or nonsensical answers (with the same guilty looks) that contradicted each other.

Aster was fairly sure that if she had had several months, she would be able to get the truth out of them by means of logic and sufficiently tricky questions. But she didn't have several months. General Monroe was no more happy with the evasion than Aster was (and the humorless, sociopath general did not like surprises even on holidays), and he was sure that if he had several days, he would have gotten the truth out of them by far more direct and brutal methods. But though he had the time, he couldn't use those methods. He didn't dare alienate the people who might be able to get them accepted in whatever society existed in Wisconsin without having to fight a war.

In the mean time, Aster had another way to get at least some information about the _Vampire_, as well as distracting the attention of General Monroe and the rest of the Army from things she intended to get that she did not want them to know about.

The right bait.

Now that she was actually looking at her commanding officer, Aster felt a bit guilty about this, but it wasn't as if she was betraying the Army. In fact, what she wanted to do would help them. But if they knew about it, they wouldn't allow it. They would take for themselves the assets that Aster needed to save all their lives, over the long term.

"I need six people, and a few of the small carts that the guards used." Aster told General Monroe. "I want to have a look around the Hall of Fallen Heroes. There's stuff there we can use."

"We?' General Monroe looked askance at Aster. She may not have craved power, but she was only slightly less greedy than anyone else. And he had heard fantastic tales of some of the artifacts in the Hall of Fallen Heroes. He dismissed most of them as exaggeration, but if even a fraction of them were true, there were weapons there that could not be gotten anywhere else for any price. Weapons fit for royalty, which is what he intended his children to be.

Aster shrugged. "There's stuff *I* can use. I don't think it would be much good to anyone else. Except maybe the _Vampire_, if we can get him to cooperate. Before he became a _Vampire, _he was awfully smart. He wrote books I can't begin to understand."

"And what about the rest of it?"

"I wish I could have it all." Aster admitted. "But I know damn well you won't let me. There is some armor there, it belonged to someone called 'Captain America'. Supposedly, it's invulnerable. I know you're probably going to want that, maybe not for yourself, but for Evan, when he gets older."

"Obviously." General Monroe said dryly. At least he and the Zookeeper both understood greed.

"I'd like to have it for myself, but I know you won't let me. At least, not permanently. But I'd like to use it once, when we get to Milwaukee."

"And once you get it on, then how exactly do we get it off you?" He sneered.

"It'll protect me from weapons. At least if it does what people say it does. I don't think it will prevent twelve other people from jumping on me and keeping me immobile enough to get me out of it. Or suffocating me and stripping it off my body."

The general thought this through. "True enough. What do you want it for?"

"I intend to try and catch a _Vampire._" Aster's lip curled slightly. "So I need the right bait. You taught me that. In this case, the right bait is blood. I haven't got the stomach to chain someone else up, cut them, and wait for the _Vampire _to show up and kill them. So all I have is myself. And I don't intend to use myself as bait for the _Vampire_ without protection of some kind. I don't think acid will help, and I don't want him hurt, in any event. So it has to be armor."

"You'd be better off using someone else as bait." General Monroe remarked as casually as if he were discussing fishing methods. "Then you might have a chance. But if you want to go and get yourself killed over stupid conscience, then so be it. I don't think you'll catch the damn _Vampire _either way. It's hard to live trap a man or an animal. Especially a man. It's easier to kill them. Really, though, I don't give a damn. It's your life to fuck up or throw away the way you want. But I will try that armor first. You say all it does is make one invulnerable, but I'm not sure. I've heard God knows how many stories about the stuff in that place. If it makes me stronger, or gives me powers of some kind that would make it hard to get the armor back from you, I'm keeping it."

Aster didn't like that. She needed protection. "I need that armor. I'll give it back when I'm done."

He shrugged. "Maybe you really mean that. Maybe you don't. But power has a way of corrupting the best of us. Even you, even if you don't think so now. But you've changed, you know. Maybe you don't see it, but me and Daniel Wolfkiller do. Once you taste owning something like that, you might change your mind."

"I won't change my mind." But General Monroe didn't seem to care. Leaning on a curved staff he was using as a cane, he called over the six soldiers Aster had requested. He sent three of them for some of the small electric carts, one of which he sat on, while Aster and the rest of the soldiers walked beside it, and went down the main hallway of the palace to the Hall of Fallen Heroes.

The doors were locked, of course. The Maestro's trophy museum had not been open to the public since his unborn son had died. Even if it had been, since that event, since the Maestro had gone further into madness, nobody would have wanted or dared to enter the palace willingly, without specific invitation.

Not that the doors were much barrier. They were wood. Thick, and strong enough to keep out the casual intruder, but no match against six strong men, once they fetched a few sledgehammers. Two of the soldiers bashed at the door several times, and the lock broke off with a splintering, ripping sound. The hinges opened with a squeal, like a coffin being opened. It was dark inside, and a little dust drifted out into the hallway, along with a musty smell. It reminded Aster of breaking into an ancient tomb. Which, perhaps, it was. The bodily remains of several dead Heroes were inside, of course. It was a tomb of noble kings, of Heroes. An image came to her mind, of the spirits of the Heroes lined up, glittering glowing figures of gold and silver, regarding her with disapproving judgement. Aster felt slightly ashamed, nothing but a scavenger, little better than a rat, robbing them. She could never be worthy of them. Never be a Hero. Never be anything more than… a phrase from a book came to her mind. "..that which moved and bred on a corpse." In this case, the corpses were quite literal. But she had very little choice. She _needed_ what was inside that room.

Besides, she thought petulantly, what did the Heroes know? They had lived lives like Kings and Gods before the War, eating meals every day that were rare feasts to Aster, and unknown to almost everyone else in the Army. Certainly they had never eaten rats or bugs, or been raped by the Maestro, or had to watch him throwing living people into a fire, or eating children. Or had their sister raped to death and father kill himself.

And despite all that, they failed. They had been killed by the Maestro, leaving Aster and everyone else left alive to pay the price of their failure. The only one with the wits to keep himself alive was the _Vampire, _Morbius. Who had been spit on by all the others, but he was still smarter than them all, so far as she was concerned.

Aster made an obscene gesture at the imagined souls of the Heroes, that might be standing inside that door.

"Fuck you." She said under her breath to any ghosts that might be listening. "You failed. Failed and left me to pay the price. Now I'll take what I bloody well need from your stupid dead bodies to do what you couldn't."

General Monroe spared Aster barely a glance. Whatever obscenity she was mumbling about was obviously not directed at him, so it didn't constitute insubordination. He got off the cart, pulled the doors wider, and squinted at the darkness. "We'll need torches or flashlights." He said sourly. The lights elsewhere were working, now that the fuses had been replaced. The ones inside must have been broken or burned out. Or so he thought.

"Maybe not." Aster said. Screw the ghosts of the Heroes anyways. She half closed her eyes, remembering the room before them from years ago, when it had been well lit, and she had spent time there. There had been lights in the ceiling. So there must have been a switch. Surely it was near the door… if she could just remember. She reached in with one hesitant hand, as if one of the dead Heroes inside might somehow come back to life and seize such an unworthy looter as herself. Surely it had to be near the door… this door… she wasn't sure she was brave enough to try and cross the room in the dark to look for the switch if it were near the doors on the other side. After everything she had done, sneaking into the palace, attacking the two guards by herself, stopping a crowd of would-be rapists, and promising two children not all that much younger than herself that she would take care of them, it felt like whatever little courage she had was used up. Even though she still needed it.

There it was. She felt a cold, plastic bump with her hands and flicked it upwards. There was a hum, and a clicking noise, and the lights on the ceiling blinked on. At least most of them did. A few were burned out and two of them were broken, smashed somehow. There was a streak of dried blood across one of the broken lights and thick stains on the floor that looked like blood had puddled there, then dried as well. Aster ignored it. It was no surprise, after the rest of what she had seen in the palace. Just one more horror story out of hundred, or perhaps thousands, that had been authored by the Maestro and his guards.

General Monroe paid little attention to the condition of the lights, or evidence of murder. He had interest only for the practical contents of the room. His eyes lit up as he saw some of the ancient weapons that were on display.

"Nice." There was a slight leer on his face, that reminded Aster of the expression Paul Rasse and his friends had, the times they had raped her. It struck her as slightly sick that General Monroe would feel some sort of sexual attraction towards weapons meant for killing, but perhaps it was none of her business. And so long as she got what she wanted, and he was distracted by this bait, she was prepared to ignore a great deal of perversion on his part.

The injured General directed one of his soldiers to take a large, complicated looking gun out of a case. With difficulty, wincing at his injuries, he lifted the gun, aimed it at a point at the ceiling and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

"Bloody fuck." A few worse words came out of his mouth. "Is there any ammo around for this thing?"

Aster looked at it. "I don't think it uses bullets."

"Bullshit." General Monroe spat. "All guns use bullets."

"It's not…" Aster struggled to find the words to explain what the problem was. "It's shaped like a gun, and it probably killed people at one time, but I think it works differently than regular guns. If you look at the end of the barrel, there's a lens, like a magnifying glass, rather than a hole that a bullet comes out of. And there's little wires on the one side there. I think it must have used some sort of battery, like the ones in the trucks, except smaller and probably more powerful, and shot a laser or something."

General Monroe knew what a laser was. Sometimes if one was unlucky or stupid, one would run into one of the Maestro's guards who had a laser weapons. It didn't happen very often. Such weapons were rare. They had all been made before the War, and most of them had broken at some time during the last century. But there were still a few around.

He swore and tossed the gun - or whatever the hell it was - aside. There was little chance of getting whatever sort of batteries or other sort of power source the weapon might have used. In fact, he was forced to admit to himself, at some point in the future, Evan, or Evan's descendants would inevitably run out of Pre-War bullets for ordinary guns. And there was no way to make more, not at their current level of technology. Brass was reusable, and making lead balls and gunpowder were within their capabilities as well. But the primers in the back of the bullets were some sort of exotic chemical they had no way of making.

And then what? Back to bows and arrows? A lot of the people living around Dystopia has already gone that way as had most of the people in Wisconsin. Daniel Wolfkiller had some notion of converting rifles to flintlocks, or possibly making his own flintlock on a forge, but in Monroe's opinion, Wolfkiller was an impractical dreamer, barely any more connected to reality than the Zookeeping bitch herself. Just look at how he had screwed up his own life, leaving Monroe's service to run off with some woman, then losing her to the Maestro.

No, they were going to go backwards. Still, that didn't change his dreams. The kings and queens of hundreds of years ago had ruled vast empires with bows and swords, and his children could do much the same. And speaking of swords, weren't those blades of some sort that he saw up on the wall? He got off the cart and limped over to them. Yes, they were blades. Six of them, sharp and curved, and attached to a metal skeleton of all things. Perhaps it was an ancient metal sculpture of some kind. There was a tag below it, covered with dust. General Monroe, wiped it off and read what was written there:

"Wolverine" He spoke the word, and frowned. He looked over at Aster, who seemed to be staring at the lights above them. "What's a 'Wolverine'? I thought it was an animal of some sort."

The General's question broke Aster out of her macabre speculations of what might have happened to splatter blood around the room. "It is, but it's also the name of one of the Heroes from before the war. Look, there's a file cabinet below him… or his skeleton. It probably tells about him in there."

Aster pulled open the metal sliding drawer with a loud scrape. A few flakes of reddish rust and black paint fell to the floor, and Aster pulled out the first folder. She skimmed through the papers quickly. A few minutes went by, and she finally set them to one side. "Interesting." She commented.

"What's interesting?" demanded the General.

"Oh, it talks about his skeleton. And those sword things coming out of it. Some kind of metal called 'Adamantium'. I never heard of it, but it says it's supposedly indestructible."

"Yeah, that's interesting." Monroe licked his lips. "Real interesting. If I put a hilt on them, they'd make damn good swords."

"Probably." Aster said in a tone that indicated she wasn't much interested in swords. She preferred the bow. Why put yourself close to an enemy if you didn't have to? "But what's more interesting is that it says in here that this 'Wolverine', whoever he was, could supposedly heal any injury or disease. No matter how bad it was."

"Well, that's real nice for him and all" the sarcasm in Erick Monroe's tone was obvious, "But that hardly does me any good, now does it."

"No, it doesn't. But it should maybe worry you. Because apparently he ran into something he couldn't heal. _Something_ killed him at any rate."

The General shrugged. Perhaps the theoretical question of what could kill someone who was unkillable was interesting to Aster, but since it would take far less to kill him or other mere mortals such as himself, it really didn't matter. Besides, he didn't have much longer anyways.

"Probably the War." Aster speculated aloud. "Or maybe the Maestro."

"Possibly." Monroe agreed, but he really had no more interest in the matter, than Aster did in swords made of exotic metal. He pointed at the skeleton and gave an order to his soldiers. "Get that down from there and find a way to get those blades off. Bring the over to Wolfkiller and see what he can do about getting hilts on them. They'll make good swords for my children… and the best of those who protect them."

The latter statement was deliberately calculated, of course. His children were not the Maestro. They could not lift a truck, or rule by themselves. They would need many others to support them, and the others would have to share in some of the rewards of power, such as the swords made from indestructible, Pre-War metal. Because if they were not given rewards for supporting his children, they would sooner or later take what they wanted for themselves by overthrowing them.

The skeleton of 'Wolverine' was mounted to a dark board with several bolts, and one of the soldiers opened a case of tools, and began working on freeing it, being careful to avoid cutting himself on the sharp blades. In the meantime, General Monroe looked at the other treasures that were in the Hall of Fallen Heroes, his eyes getting wider with each new sight. There were several guns that looked like they took regular bullets. And who knew, when those ran out, perhaps Daniel Wolfkiller could pull off his promised miracle of conversion to flintlocks. Power was relative. When those around you were armed with little more than sticks and stones, the army with flintlocks would rule.

The greed in Monroe's eyes did not go un-noticed by Aster. She waited for an opportune moment, when the other soldiers from the Army of Darkness had wandered some distance away, gaping at the ancient treasures that had once belonged to Heroes.

"These aren't the only weapons in the Palace." She whispered in Monroe's ear, laying out several more layers of bait. "There's an armory, somewhere, for the guards."

The General nodded. He took the bait. Of course he did. He was not Aster, and could not turn down power of any sort.

"Sergeant Billings!" He snapped at the nearest soldier.

The man snapped to attention. "Sir?"

"There has to be an armory somewhere in this Palace, where the Maestro's guards kept their weapons." He turned to Aster, "Do you know where it is?"

"I think corridor E, on the third floor. Or maybe it's corridor D. I'm not sure." Aster knew perfectly well that it was corridor D, but she wanted to make the General look smart in front of his men by making herself look less intelligent than she actually was. The more he thought about the power _he_ was getting, the less time and brain cells he would have to think about what Aster might be up to.

"You heard her." General Monroe said to the sergeant. "Go and get as many men as you need, and some more of these carts. Find it. Take everything we can use. Destroy the rest, there's no sense in leaving weapons in the hands of our enemies."

Sergeant Billings hurried off, and Monroe looked around some more at the treasures of the room. He pointed at a red, white, and blue suit of scale armor, mounted on a wall plaque similar to the one that 'Wolverine's' skeleton had been on. There was a matching shield next to it. The colors were bright, despite a layer of dust on them. "Is that what you were talking about? Captain America's armor?"

"I think so. Let me check." Aster was not one to rely on myths and rumors. She dusted off a plaque beneath the armor, and verified that it did, indeed, say 'Captain America'. However, much to her annoyance, there was no file cabinet associated with it. She made a face.

"Well, it says that it's Captain America's armor. But there's no files about it. I don't know why."

"Easy enough to see if the stories are real." General Monroe gestured at the nearest soldier. "Shoot the damn thing and see if it leaves a hole."

Aster opened her mouth, about to warn against this, but before she could, a shot rang out from the soldier's rifle. There was a loud 'clink', then a 'zing' of a bullet rebounding through the air. She glared upwards, along the path the bullet had taken after being repelled by the armor, then glared at Monroe. That was not a good idea. What did Monroe think, that the bullet would simply stop and stick to the front of the armor, or fall to the floor? All that energy had to go _somewhere._

She wanted to berate the General for such a stupid mistake, but forced her mouth to shut. Nobody had actually been hurt, and the last thing she needed was for the General to concentrate his thoughts on her, rather than the bait.

"Sorry." Monroe apologized of his own accord. "I wasn't thinking. I never really saw anything that was bulletproof before. I ought to have taken it out and tested it with some sort of berm or sandbags around for protection. Still, it's the hazards of war, and no harm done, and now at least we know."

He waved at the soldier who had fired the shot. "Get that down for me so I can try it on."

In a few moments the armor was laid out across the back of the cart. Injured as he was, General Monroe needed the soldier to help him put the armor on. Aster turned to face the other way. While the close quarters they had lived in while in the Underworld, the former iron mines where they had trained meant that both male and female soldiers in the Army of Darkness often saw each other naked (and were expected to be disciplined enough not to act inappropriately because of it), somehow this was different. Perhaps because it was not the Underworld, perhaps because despite the fact that she was not completely obedient, Monroe was still her commanding officer, or perhaps due to lingering embarrassment over the act she had started to perform on him when he asked her to demonstrate how she would go about seducing an enemy soldier as a distraction.

Or perhaps it was that Monroe was old, and ugly, and scarred and had who knew what sorts of malformities from the cancer he had, and she simply didn't _want _to know what he looked like under his clothes.

"Well," Monroe said a few minutes later, "How do I look?"

Aster shrugged. "Like the old American flag, I guess."

"Not the best of colors." The general grimaced. "If I had time, I'd get this thing painted or something. That is, if I had any paint." He laughed at his own joke.

"How do you feel?" Aster asked. "Are you any stronger? Or is it healing the injuries you have?"

General Monroe poked at his own body a few times, reminding Aster of something she couldn't quite remember at the moment. "I still hurt like a son of bitch. As much as before, so far as I can tell. If it heals wounds, then it doesn't do so immediately. And I don't think I feel any stronger. Let me see."

He limped over to one corner of the cart, put his hands under it, and attempted to lift. It raised a bare fraction of an inch, due to play in whatever sorts of springs or shock absorbers it had, then the General let go.

"Not any stronger, either." He seemed disgusted and disappointed. "I won't be using this to fight the Maestro any time soon, and if you ask me, you're a damn fool to think you can use it to fight the _Vampire_. Still, I'm not going to stop you. If you want to use it, once you're at the _Destination_, I'll instruct my soldiers to let you. But if you try to keep it for yourself, instead of giving it to Evan once you're through, I'll tell them to strip it off your dead body, understood?"

"Fair enough." Aster nodded. "There's only a few other things here I want, and I don't think they'd be any good for you. Everything else is for you, or whoever you say should have it."

"I'll decide what is good for me, Zookeeper." General Monroe said bluntly. "What is it that you want from here."

Aster pointed at a ragged, bloodstained suit of red and blue cloth, the one that had once belonged to the _Vampire, _Morbius. "I want the _Vampire's _clothes. And all the files on him, that are below it. If I'm to catch him, I need to know as much as I can about him."

"Fine." He nodded. "What else do you need."

Aster pointed at a large skeleton, nearly as tall as the Maestro himself, inside lightly tinted glass. The skeleton appeared to have a light green tinge to it, though perhaps that was merely caused by the glass.

"That skeleton." She insisted. "And whatever files are down below it."

General Monroe read the name tag below the large glass case. "Leonard Samson. Big fellow, wasn't he? Who was he, a giant _Vampire?"_

"No. Not a _Vampire. _I remember reading about him. He was a _Gamma." _The word was spat out as a curse. "Like the Maestro."

The thought of anyone else like the Maestro alarmed General Monroe, and most of the soldiers with them, who made various gestures of obscenity or appeals to whatever gods they believed in.

"What the hell do you want that for?"

"I'm worried the Maestro might find us, someday. Even at the _Destination._ Before that happens, I want to find a way to kill him, if I can. I don't dare bring the Shulk along, I don't trust a live female _Gamma_ any more than I'd trust a male one. But a dead one, that's another story. I don't know how much I can learn from those files, and his bones. But I'll take every resource I can get. And if I can somehow get the _Vampire_ on my side, he used to be a doctor. He might be able to tell things that I can't from the bones. Forensics and stuff."

The general frowned at the skeleton. "I've heard stories that _Gammas_ can come back to life, even from bare bones, if you pump enough radiation into them. And there's a lot of hot areas, between us and the _Destination._ You sure this is a good idea?

"I'll put it in a lead lined chest." Aster said. "And check on it several times a day. If it looks like it's growing new tissue or something, I'll burn it. Trust me, I'm not a fool. I don't want a live _Gamma _anywhere around me, any more than you or anyone else does, and I don't care to be raped nearly to death now by a 'Leonard Samson', whoever the hell he was, any more than I cared to have the Maestro have done the same thing back when I was 14."

The older man's face wrinkled as he squinted suspiciously at the skeleton. "It's not that I don't trust you… but I don't trust you. Or anyone. Especially a _Gamma. _Even a dead one. You can take it with you, but I'm going to appoint someone to check on it several times a day during the trip as well. Just in case you forget, or decide to do something stupid."

"Fair enough." Aster agreed.

General Monroe gestured at his armor. "This damn stuff is heavy, and it hurts where I was shot. But I'm going to wear it, for a while yet. It'll keep me from getting shot again, just in case there's some of the Maestro's guard's that we missed."

That was not his only reason. Aster thought. Wearing the armor of a dead Hero made General Monroe seem almost like a Hero himself. It was all about getting as much power as he could. Power that he intended to give to his children. If he could. Aster had her doubts. Still, there was yet more power that she intended to offer him. Not that he'd likely be able to take it. Supposedly the Maestro himself could not take it. But the General would not be able to resist it. And it was one final distraction, so tempting it would likely keep a large part of the entire Army of Darkness occupied for at least a few more hours. The time Aster needed.

"There's another thing in here you might be interested in, General." Aster said. "A hammer. Supposedly it has the power of a God. There's something odd about it anyways. I heard that the Maestro himself couldn't lift it."

Aster led General Monroe over to a rather plain looking table, with an ancient, battered hammer resting on it. It had a rather short handle and thick head that looked like it weighed at least 20 lbs. The general moved slowly, wincing slightly from the armor pulling on his injuries. Her instinct was to hold him up, but that wouldn't do. The man who had to be held up by a woman would look weak to other men, and if she embarrassed General Monroe in that way, he would probably not give her the things she wanted.

_Too big for me, _Aster thought. _Or even for most men. Wolfkiller might be able to manage it._

She thought about Wolfkiller easily lifting large barrels of water, back when they had camped by some old train cars, and flushed slightly red. His strength was attractive… but the unpleasant horsemaster was not her type. He had been nasty to her too many times, even if some of it was intended to help her.

General Monroe was close enough to the Hammer now, to read the inscription on the metal head:

"Whosoever holds this hammer,

if they be worthy,

shall possess the power of Thor."

"Thor's Hammer." General Monroe was impressed, which said a lot. "Is it real? Or just a model?"

"There's something odd about it." Aster said. She frowned at an unpleasant thought. "The Maestro used to try, sometimes, to lift it. But never could. He'd always pitch a fit, afterwards."

"To have the power of a God!" General Monroe breathed heavily. He reached out to take the hammer, and Aster sucked in her breath. She didn't think that he would be able to lift that hammer. Not if the Maestro couldn't. It was a calculated risk. She needed the distraction the hammer would inevitably provide. But she still not want to see General Monroe with the power of Thor, if Thor were real. Power corrupted, and the General was not a nice man to start with. With the power of a God, he might be as bad or worse than the Maestro himself. It was, after all, only the fact that he was not as strong as the Maestro and needed other people to fight in his war and found his nation of _Monrovia _for him, that kept his worst impulses in restraint.

And Aster had never liked thinking too much about the Hammer, from the first time she found out about it, back when she had been a _Betty. _The thought that magic might be real, or at least had been, before the War, was extremely disturbing to her. It was bad enough that the world was not the way she wanted it to be. For the world to not even be the way she _believed_ it to be was nearly intolerable.

Her calculated risk paid off. General Monroe could not lift the hammer. Not an inch. He yanked at it several times, then finally glared at Aster.

"Is this thing attached to the table, somehow?" He barked at Aster in annoyance.

"No, if that were all it was, the Maestro wouldn't have had a problem with it. At one time I thought maybe it was made of something really heavy, like metal from a dwarf star or something, that could weigh hundreds of tons and still be that small. But if that were the case, then the table couldn't hold it up. It's real. Magic. Not that I like it."

General Monroe wasn't entirely sure what a 'dwarf star' was, though he gathered from the context that it was something extremely dense, so that a small amount of it might be far too heavy for even the Maestro to lift. But as Aster had pointed out, something that heavy would not be able to be supported by the table, or even the floor, for that matter. It was magic, probably, but to him it was useless. He couldn't lift it. And it didn't seem likely that prayers to the God Thor would change that fact, or bring about an act of divine intervention that would cure his cancer, or anything else useful or pleasant.

As the General was lost in his thoughts, Aster frowned at the hammer, offended by it's very existence. For the most part she wasn't sure that she believed in God. Or any God. But she could not deny the evidence of a hammer that even the Maestro himself could not lift. And probably the God, Thor, was insulted enough that filthy scavengers like herself and the rest of the Army of Darkness were daring to soil his hammer by laying their unworthy fingers on it.

But then, she thought, it was just his hammer. Thor himself was not here. And the hammer was in the Hall of Fallen Heroes. Logically, that meant that Thor, immortal or not, had fallen, had been defeated at well. Somehow. Either by the War, or by the Maestro.

Tears welled in Aster's eyes. If a God, an actual God, had failed to destroy the Maestro, then by what sort of incredible audacity did she think she could succeed?

Perhaps she could not succeed. Probably she could not succeed. Perhaps the most she could do was merely to run away, which was the extent of even General Monroe's ambition.

But she would still try. As insane as it was. Most of the others in the Army of Darkness thought her mad, though they also respected her for the things she knew, and the things she had done. And that was part of her madness, that once she was presented with a problem, she would not rest until she found an answer, even if it took her the rest of her life to find it, and even if it was beyond her ability to carry out.

Monroe was disgusted by her tears. He curled his lip. It was unbefitting of a soldier. What the hell did she have to cry about anyways? She wasn't the one having her guts eaten by cancer. "Why don't you try lifting it?" He suggested.

"Me?" Aster seemed surprised at the thought. It was what she had hoped for in a way, that Monroe would occupy himself testing people in his army with Thor's Hammer. It would keep him busy for the time she needed. But that he would consider her first had never occurred to her. She didn't really want the power of a God, especially a God of War. Maybe people told themselves romantic stories about War, so they could live with it, but she'd seen what it was. It was bad and worse. It started out working yourself nearly to death under horrible conditions in order to train so that you might be able to fight and survive the war. And it ended up with people like Frederick Black being hung for doing things they had little choice about, and women and children being raped and tortured and starved. And drooling at the smell of roasting human flesh even when you had a perfectly good cold sandwich a few feet away. She looked at the General, puzzled that he would choose her when she felt that way.

Monroe shrugged. "I obviously can't use it myself. The next best thing would be to have someone else in my Army who can. It would solve a lot of problems. To have an actual God on our side. Unless it's just some sort of magical joke, that nobody can lift, then you have to be 'worthy' to lift it. You did stop those soldiers from raping the _Betties. _Nobody else did. I wouldn't have. So why don't you try it? You might as well, since you're here."

Aster frowned. Despite her dislike of the hammer, and everything it represented, she couldn't think of a good excuse _not_ to try it. She rubbed her hands together and gripped the handle of the hammer…

Which would not move. She might just as well have been trying to uproot Ygdrasil, the world oak tree from the same stories that Thor was in.

"It doesn't like me, either." Aster said bluntly. "Fine. I don't much like it. Fuck it, and fuck Thor, too, if he's still around."

"Blasphemy." said one of the soldiers, crossing himself, which was rather funny, considering it was a non-Christian diety in question. "You shouldn't talk that way about a God."

"I'll talk any way I damn well like. No God ever helped me, when I was going through hell. So, so far as I'm concerned, they can just leave me alone. Because I can promise you, there will be trouble if they do _not _leave me alone." Aster stuck her nose in the air. After all, the Maestro had bowed down to her that one time. It didn't seem like he had ever bowed to Thor. He had simply killed him (unless the War had done that), and all that was left of the stupid old God was his dumb hammer. She guessed that made her smarter than Thor, God or no God.

Speaking of the hammer, she pointed at it, and spoke to General Monroe. "If there's no-one who can lift that, do me a favor and rope it off. It's actually a pity there's no way to melt it down. I honestly can't think of anything more useless than a hammer… that you can't even use as a hammer. And something that can't be moved - at least by most people - seems dangerous to me. What if it ends up blocking a road or something?"

"There's no road here." The General shook his head. Really, the Zookeeper did think of the most insane damn scenarios. He turned to one of his soldiers. "I don't know if this thing is real or not, but if the Maestro can't lift it, it's at least Magic, if nothing else. It's worth trying. Go back and get every man, woman, child, and bloody abortion in the Army down here, in groups of ten. Start with Evan and Gina, then the highest ranks first. Not that some three year old brat has much chance, I'd say. But if Thor thinks a 3 year old is 'worthy', I'll still take it, and worry about how to get him to follow orders, later."

Aster had to hide a smile. Other than the possibility of someone in the Army being 'worthy', things could not be better. It would take at least a few hours for everyone to try that hammer, and in the meantime, nobody would be thinking of much else.

"I want to go look at loading some of the salt for myself." Aster said to the General. It wasn't actually a lie. She was going to get salt. However, it wasn't the _only _thing she was going to get. "Can you get a couple men to load up that skeleton and Morbius's stuff for me onto a couple pallets? After you're done with the hammer, I mean? I'm going to go get one of those powered forklifts for the salt, so I'll wheel this stuff into my truck later."

"Fine, I'll see to it." Monroe waved distractedly. Let the Zookeeper have her trinkets from this room, and her salt. He'd take the weapons here, and in the Maestro's armory, and Thor's hammer, if anyone could use the damn thing. Maybe Wolfkiller, though in his opinion (which was the only one General Monroe cared about) the Horsemaster was a coward who had let his own wife sacrifice herself to the Maestro. So probably he wasn't 'worthy'. What would a God of War consider 'worthy' anyways? Humans were easy to bait. Even one as logical as Aster.

But what sort of bait would a God want?


	33. Chapter 33

Chapter 33. The Dystopian Job

Leaving her General to his thoughts of power and weapons, Aster walked deliberately slowly as she left the Hall of Fallen Heroes. She was sure that Monroe would give her what she wanted from there, unless he changed his mind about letting her borrow Captain America's armor. But the other things, Leonard Samson's skeleton, and the _Vampire _Morbius's clothing and the files about both of them, were not things that he had use for.

As soon as she was far enough that she was sure she was out of earshot, she began jogging. There was probably enough time to do what she needed. But just barely. She ignored the occasional, gory 'decorations' that dotted the hallways of the palace. There was no time to look at them, much less do something about them. And what would she do about them anyways? Bury them? That would hardly help the dead. Aster had far more practical concerns. She needed to worry about the living.

In five minutes she was at the large room where the carts and other powered vehicles used by the Maestro's guards and servants were kept. She did not need a cart, she needed one of the large forklifts. She knew how to use one, having had to bring pallets full of food to the kitchens on occasion, back when she had been a _Betty. _The Maestro had been short of help, since his descent into ever-worsening madness, and would not waste one of his guards or favorite sycophants on menial mechanical duty if he didn't have to. Most of the other _Betty's _had had little gift for learning to operate such equipment. Or else they had feigned incompetence, having learned, unlike Aster, to keep any intelligence they might have had under their hats. Not that it much mattered any more.

The soldiers from the Army of Darkness who had been put in charge of the carts gave her little trouble. Aster was the Hero Who Had Made The Darkness. Not to mention, the only bitch the Maestro had ever bowed to, and any number of other slightly alarming things. Certainly anyone who would stand up to a mob of would-be rapists all by herself, with only a single gun, was mad, if nothing else. At any rate, if she wanted a forklift, and pallets, to bring bags of salt to her truck, they weren't going to stop her.

She looked around for a moment. The forklifts were all different, mismatched models. Hardly surprising. They had been made before the War, and any machine that still worked was acceptable by the standards of the world Aster lived in. She picked a midsized machine, mottled reddish orange rust mixing with what had perhaps once been reddish orange paint. Twin prongs, that reminded the zookeeper in her of hemipenes such as a snake had, jutted out in front. Aster unplugged the umbilical like wire that connected the forklift to an outlet in the wall, turned the key inside experimentally, and the motor whirred noisily to life. The gears all changed with only a slight clunking noise. Not the quietest thing in the world, but it would do. Most adequately. The right tool to start screwing over that green bastard with. Aster grinned ferally, turned the forklift back off, and handed the key to the soldiers who had been directed to keep them charged.

"I'll take that one. And nine pallets. And some cargo netting, the sort with straps. " Aster told them. "That's all I'll have room for on my truck. And make sure they're in good condition. Salt is _heavy."_

She actually had room for more than that, even with the barrels of water on her truck, but she needed to save room for the artifacts from the Hall of Fallen Heroes. Plus one other thing. But she would not be able to get that until the very end. If it even existed.

Soon, the nine requested pallets were in a stack, the netting in a heap on top of them, and Aster got into the forklift. She took a few moments to refamiliarize herself with the controls, then slid the forks neatly into the slots of the lowermost pallet, and lifted them.

"I'll bring the forklift back in a few hours, when I'm done with it, and leave it to be charged up again." Aster told them. "We're going to need to load a lot of things in the next day or two, before we leave."

It had now been nearly 15 minutes since she had left General Monroe in the Hall of Fallen Heroes. Aster bit her lip nervously. How much time did she have? Three hours, perhaps. Four at the most. Thor's Hammer, and the weapons she had mentioned in the Maestro's armory would keep the General and the rest of the Army distracted for a while, but not forever. Sooner or later they would think of, and want, what she intended to take for herself. She had to be done, before that happened.

Twenty minutes. She went to the dining hall, found some of the soldiers from the Army of Darkness who had just finished eating and had not found anything else useful to do with themselves. Aster scolded them for standing around rather than doing something useful, and told them to come with her to the storage room where there were sacks of salt. She had to drive more slowly than she would have liked in the forklift, so they could keep up with her. The room was locked, but Aster made short work of that by the expedient of simply bashing the door down with the forklift.

Heavy equipment was so useful. A pity she wouldn't be able to take the forklift with her. But there would be no room for it on her truck. Not with the other things she needed to take. And it was questionable whether there would be any way to power it in Wisconsin anyways.

Aster lowered the pallets that were stacked on the forklift, turned the machine off to save the battery, removed the cargo nets that were on top of the highest pallet, then dragged the topmost pallet to the ground. It landed with a clatter. Aster made a show of straightening it slightly with her foot, then she pointed at the sacks of salt.

"Load up these pallets for me." Aster said. "40 bags of salt, each."

"40 bags…" One of the soldiers looked dubiously at the pallet. "I think the pallet is too small for that."

Aster sighed. Gods preserve her from those who had never studied geometry.

"You stack them." Aster explained. She pointed at the pallet with her toe. "Make a bottom layer, three bags the long way here at this end, then also at the other end, and two bags the short way in the middle. Then do another layer on top of it, until you have five layers. That'll equal 40 bags. Make sure to fasten one of the nets around it, and strap it tight, so nothing falls off when I lift it. Then load up all the other pallets."

"How many will that be?" The soldier obvious was ignorant not only of geometry, but of math as well.

"360 bags total." Aster said, seething inside at the pointless questions. Time was going by fast, but she didn't dare appear impatient.

"That's a lot of salt." The soldier hefted one of the bags. "Can the trucks carry that much?"

It was, in fact, about seven tons of salt. A lot to load by hand, but rather little for the truck she had been given by General Monroe in exchange for extinguishing the lights in the palace the previous night.

"The truck will be fine." Aster assured him. She dusted off one of the bags. "I need you and your friends to load up these pallets for me. I have some other things to do, but I'll be back for them in an hour or so. Make sure they're ready by then."

Aster left the soldiers to their task. They did not ask her what she had to do, which was a relief, as she then would have had to think of a plausible lie. Certainly she would not tell them about the room she was going to. A room she knew about, that nobody else did.

Nobody, that was, except the Maestro. And he was not here. It was a room that he would not _let_ anyone know about, and he would have killed Aster in an instant, if he ever suspected that she knew about it, and had seen what she had seen there. That somewhere inside the monster, was a wrinkled old man, probably weaker than she was. But the monster was too strong to type on the keyboard of a Pre-War computer, without wrecking it utterly, in much the same way he was too strong to have a woman, without ruining her. The Maestro apparently didn't much care what happened to the women he used, but he _did _care, it seemed, what happened to irreplaceable Pre-War equipment.

There had been a lot of things in that room, but there was one thing in particular that interested Aster.

A ring of keys, set onto one wall. Aster intended to commit a theft, and needed it to look like nothing had been stolen. That meant she could not force the door that guarded what she wanted to steal. And if there were any keys to that place, to the Maestro's treasure chamber, that she had only briefly glimpsed once, and they were anywhere other than on the Maestro's body, then they were surely on the ring in that secret _Computer_ room. After all, the time she had seen the treasure chamber open, and gotten a glimpse of what was inside, hadn't one of the guards had that very ring of ornate looking keys in his hand, and then given it back to the Maestro, once the door was unlocked?

The Maestro, of course, was far too strong to use a key, without wrecking it, and likely the lock as well. It was why Aster had strong hopes that the keys would be in that room. Another tyrant, a more human one, would no doubt keep such important keys as the ones to his treasure chamber, on his body at all times.

But the Maestro? Keys were made of thin metal. Strong enough for an ordinary man, even a strong one like Daniel Wolfkiller. But for the Maestro, it would be barely stronger than paper. Easily bent or torn, or otherwise wrecked, so it would no longer work, and he'd have to go to the trouble and risk of having either the key or the lock replaced.

It had now been 30 minutes since Aster had left General Monroe. Aster jogged down the hallway, wishing she dared to run. But she could not arouse suspicions by appearing to be in too much of a hurry. It took five minutes to get to the room she wanted, the store room where she had hidden from the guards, so long ago. Aster turned on the lights and went inside. She was too large, now, to squeeze behind the shelves, but she was sure it was the same room. Pulling some dusty supplies off the lowest shelf, she could even see the vent on the wall. Aster wiped dust off the shelf, then crawled on her belly over it, and peered through the vent. Unfortunately she didn't have a flashlight, but the light from the store room went through the vent to a small degree. Surely that was the desk, and the blocky shape of the computer screen she had seen. It had to be.

She wiggled backwards and stood up, thinking of the layout of the palace. A map formed in her head. If the vent was by the floor in the store-room, but near the ceiling of the Maestro's secret computer room, then the room she wanted had to be down a nearby ramp, and to the left.

Aster left the store room and jogged down the ramp and to one side where the Maestro's secret room was.

Except there was nothing there. Or at least, not a doorway to the Maestro's secret _Computer _room. Just more storerooms, some with suspicious looking Pre-War jars of food on wooden shelves, some with bins full of sheets. Aster opened several of the doors in frustration, and actually kicked one of them.

"It _has_ to be here!" she growled under her breath. 40 minutes. She was wasting valuable time. She _knew _the room was there. She had seen it.

"Damn it all." She had to find it. Perhaps if she could see it better… Aster jogged quickly down the hall, flicking on the lights in every store room that seemed to be in a likely location. Then she went back up the ramp, to the store room on a higher floor, where she had originally seen the Maestro's computer room. Bending down, she looked through the vent, hoping to get a better look, now that the lights were on.

Except that they weren't on. The secret room was still nearly completely dark, the only light that which made it's way through the vent.

Mysteriouser and mysteriouser. To quote the book Alice in Wonderland. But she was Aster, not Alice. She knew that the room must be in the hallway down the ramp, and to the left. And she had turned on all the lights in every room in that section of hallway.

Yet the Maestro's secret room was dark.

It had now been nearly 45 minutes since she had left General Monroe's presence. She _had _to find that room, and find it fast.

Perhaps nobody else in Dystopia, who had not read as many books on as many subjects as Aster Aversa had, would have been able to find that room without resorting to breaking through the walls with a sledgehammer. But Aster _had _read all sorts of books. Books with pictures of optical illusions. Books about hidden rooms where fugitives had found safety. And magicians who performed clever tricks.

And jokes.

"When is a door not a door?" Aster muttered to herself. "When it's _a jar!_"

Very funny. She could not trust anything she saw in these two hallways. Very likely the color and size of the tiles on the floor and ceiling themselves were not to be trusted. Probably the Maestro had killed whatever architects and artists made this area for him, so they couldn't talk. Too bad for him that he had left that romance book in the tower chamber where the _Betties_ had stayed. The one about a rather spoiled and dull woman who was swept off her feet by a roguish stage magician.

And those store rooms on the lower floor had had wooden shelves. Wooden ones with backs. Not metal ones, as there were everywhere else in the Maestro's palace.

Pacing the length of the hallway with her feet, which she trusted more than her eyes under these circumstances, would take too long. But now she knew what she needed. Once again, Aster went down the ramp to the lower floor. She looked in a few rooms, that were the right distance down the hallway, along the floor and walls.

Sure enough, one room had subtle scrape marks, both on the floor in front of one of the wooden shelves full of jars, and marks on the ceiling above it as well.

"When it's a jar." Aster whispered. She cautiously touched one of the jars. Sure enough, it was glued to the shelf below it. Which was not a shelf at all, but a curtain. Aster examined the shelf, and saw large handprints, the right size to be the Maestro's, in the dust in two areas where there were a few jars 'missing'. Lifting that entire heavy shelf was, of course, no problem for the Maestro. It would be as easy for him as lifting only one of the jars would have been for her, had they not been glued to the shelf. The forklift could no doubt handle the job, but it was back with the bags of salt, and even if she had had it, it wouldn't have fit through the door.

Still, as they said, the bigger they were, the harder they fell. Tall shelves were not all that stable, if they weren't mounted to the wall. And if there were a door behind the shelf, it could hardly be attached to the wall. Aster pulled hard on one of the higher shelves, and more easily than she would have thought, the whole thing tipped over. She was barely able to jump out of the way, before jars of century old peaches crashed onto the hard floor. A few of them broke loose from the ancient, brittle glue that had held them on the shelves, as well. They shattered with an alarmingly loud noise, and shards of glass and peach juice flew everywhere.

Aster got a little wet, and one small bit of glass drew a sharp, red line across her lower arm. She didn't care. She wanted to suck blood and sweetness off her own wrist, but worried about food poisoning, she instead merely wiped it off on the dark tunic of her Army uniform, and regarded the door in front of her. It wasn't even metal, just a cheap wooden door that had maybe once been painted green. Hell, from the state of the wood and the tarnish on the hinges, it looked like it might have been made before the War itself. Still, it made sense. Any door strong enough to seriously slow down determined attackers, armed with sledgehammer and explosives would probably be difficult for the old man she had seen to even open. The Maestro was counting on not being found when he was in his weakened state.

Aster did not have a sledgehammer, but the door looked frail, and her onerous training in the Army of Darkness had made her strong. Stretching her arms out slightly for balance, she raised her right leg, and kicked the door as hard as she could, near the knob.

With a rather pathetic crack, a whole section of the door near the knob broke off, and it swung open, revealing the dark chamber inside.

"I got you, you bastard!" Aster declared rather illogically. She did not have the Maestro himself, and it would be decades or maybe even never, before she would. She had only managed to break into a room that he thought nobody in the world knew about. Still, she would take what she could get, and the thrill of breaking into the room was rather like the thrill of bringing down an animal, after a good hunt.

Aster reached inside, penetrating the Maestro's private chambers with her bloody arm, and flicked on the lights, before ravishing it entirely and stepping inside.

The keys were there. Hanging right where she had last seen them.

"You're mine!" Teeth bared slightly, she reached up and seized the keys off the wall with a violent motion, like a thief viciously stealing fruit off a tree he had no right to. Aster held her breath involuntarily, as if she might somehow be caught in this act of theft, and in the silence, heard a humming noise, punctuated by a tinny rattle every few seconds.

_What is that?_ She worried that perhaps it was some sort of mechanized weapon that the Maestro had left behind to guard his keys in his absence, and quickly looked around. But no, there was no motion that might hint at danger.

Cocking her head, Aster focused on the sound. It was coming from a rather drab looking metal box, perhaps not quite as high as her head, that had once been white, but now was so dirty it was nearly grey, and marked with rust.

_What is that? _She asked herself again. _A pre-War refrigerator? For what? Snacks when the Maestro is in here, in his __**human**__ form?_

It seemed odd that the Maestro wouldn't simply bring food with him. He wasn't stupid. Unless he spent long periods of time in the room, so that food might spoil.

Curious, Aster pulled open the refrigerator. It was hard to see inside it, there was a long sort of light bulb inside, but it was burned out. She opened the door wider, so the light from the room could shine in, and didn't understand for a moment what she was seeing.

The refrigerator was filled with hundreds of tiny jars. Some clear, some brownish. Or perhaps they were tiny bottles, the size a doll would use. Aster picked one of them up and turned it over in her hands. She had always been fascinated by bottles, for some reason she didn't understand herself, and these bottles were almost like something that could have been made by fairies, if there were such a thing.

Then Aster remembered. She had seen bottles… or perhaps they were jars, like that before. Doctor Llewellyn had had them in his office. They were for medicines.

Aster took a deep breath, leaned down, and read the labels on the bottles. Lidocaine. Codeine. Morphine. Ampicillin. Amoxicillin. Other words that she wasn't sure of.

She straightened up. She knew those words. At least some of them. Painkillers and antibiotics.

And codeine.

Aster licked her lips, regarding a small brown bottle of the stuff. She had needed it once….

And still needed it…

There was a smell like sweet rust, somewhere deep in her nose, or her brain. The codeine had made her forget… forget what the Maestro and Paul Rasse had done to her. Forget that she never felt like a real person…

And the dreams had been _divine. _Pure mind made into material reality. Or at least, it had _seemed _real. More real than she felt when she was awake.

Aster thought about it. The Army could use this. The soldiers wounded in the war were suffering, missing limbs, some of them, and there was nothing but opium and damn little of that to give them. And they didn't dare use too much, if they simply kept them unconscious they wouldn't be able to eat or drink.

And there was so much of it… she could take a little. There would still be plenty for everyone else.

Her mouth was wet, and a trickle of drool ran down one side of her chin. Aster wiped it away absently, wondering why the Maestro kept what might be the last supply of these drugs (at least, this side of Iceland) locked away. It wasn't as if the Maestro would ever need them. Strong as Gammas were, they seldom got hurt and never got sick.

Something about the latter thought nagged at Aster's mind, but she didn't have time to think about it. Then she thought about Zack and Michelle. It was true that there were a lot of the tiny little jars… but as many as there were, they were still finite in number. Someday they would run out, and what if the day after they ran out, one of them got hurt? Or she, herself, got hurt, and there was no help for it because she had wasted the codeine on dreams?

Slowly, as if the door to the refrigerator weighed hundreds of pounds, Aster closed it. It was true she was planning a theft, but it was a theft of necessity. She would not stoop to stealing merely to feed her own cravings. She had enough problems with not being able to control her own fears. Being unable to control her own addiction would make things worse.

Besides, once she told everyone else in the Army about the contents of this refrigerator, she would be even more of a _Hero _in their eyes. It was a lie, she knew. She was nothing but a miserable coward and a thief who had the unearned advantage of an undeserved education. But she needed the lie. _Heroes _weren't questioned, and she needed people not to question what she was going to be doing in the immediate future.

Turning firmly away from the refrigerator, Aster was about to leave, and then decided to look around to see what else might be in the room, that could be of use. After all, the Maestro had gone to a great deal of trouble to keep this room secret, and it had worked, at least against everyone except a too-small girl with a penchant for getting into out of the way places. But the Maestro had become more and more mad over the years. Perhaps when he had first built the palace, and the secret room, he had not planned on keeping young girls as _Betties._

There seemed to be little else in the room, other than a machine that made coffee, and a threadbare bathrobe hung on a hook, the same one she had seen the Maestro wearing when he had been in the shape of a rather ugly old man. Other than that, there was just the chair, and the pre-War _Computer. _Aster thought about spitting or peeing on the robe, but turning away from the codeine had made her mouth dry, and her bladder seemed empty as well. She was about to leave, when she mentally slapped herself in the face.

The _Computer._

Aster knew what a _Computer _was, of course. She had read pre-War books and magazines about them. But she had never used one, and the one she had seen the Maestro using in this room, was the only one she knew of that still worked. As such, she really hadn't thought of it being of much use, other than as a historical artificact. rather like the objects in the Hall of Fallen Heroes, but with less weapons potential.

_Stupid, stupid, stupid._ She berated herself mentally. What was the _Computer, _except a form of a book or a file? A source of knowledge. Of power, and perhaps fear. Many of the artifacts in the Hall of Fallen heroes had file cabinets below them, with documents about the Heroes, that the curious of Dystopia could read (or have read to them, if they were illiterate as many were), so as to learn about the Powers of the Heroes that the Maestro had defeated. And their Powers had not saved them from the Maestro, so what chance would mere ordinary humans have? The knowledge inspired fear.

And that was how the Maestro wanted people to think. He ruled through fear, as much as strength.

And _fear_ was something Aster knew all about. Since the Maestro had put her in a cage, she had had very few moments without fear. And she knew it not only in herself, but in others, when she saw it.

And now, she smelled _fear, _not in herself, but in the Maestro. It was such a unique experience, so unbelievable, that perhaps only someone with Aster's experience in watching and understanding animals of all sorts, even the human sort, would have recognized the signs of it enough to believe it.

_Why hide, you bastard?_ She thought. _Why hide? Why hide yourself, and this room, and this Computer? Why, unless you are afraid? You may be mad, you may be the devil himself as I once thought, but you are NOT stupid. If you are afraid, it's because there's something you're afraid of. Some way to defeat you. You stupid, ugly, fuck._

There was, in her, the thrill of the hunt. She imagined, as she had before, being a strong, immortal, female _Vampire. _Much faster and stronger and more deadly than weak little merely human Aster Aversa. Ripping the Maestro's fat, ugly throat out with her teeth, and letting the green blood gush down her throat, like water from a fountain. Then again, probably blood that color would taste awful. But she could enjoy watching it, and let it splash onto her skin like that… who had that crazy royal woman been that she had once read about? Bathory something or the other.

Not that that would be all that enjoyable, either. Fantasizing about bathing in the Maestro's blood might be satisfying, but the reality was that it would probably be sticky and dirty and smell bad. A nice hot bubble bath was just the thing for her. A good leisurely soak, not like the short, cold showers that were all she had gotten since she had left the Maestro's palace.

Besides, although thinking about being a _Vampire_ was fun, and she might be curious to try it for a short while, she didn't think she would want to be one permanently. From what she had read about the _Vampire, _Michael Morbius, he had a hard time controlling himself, and was often attacking people, and sometimes even killing them. That did not sound good. Aster certainly didn't want to attack Zack or his sister or anyone else in the Army of Darkness. At least not to kill them. Kicking them when they were disagreeable and stupid to knock sense into their heads was about as violent as she wanted to get with them. Killing them was out. They were not, after all, the Maestro. Not even General Monroe, as sociopathic as he was. Nor could she really advocate letting the _Vampire,_ Morbius continue to kill people, either. She would have to do something about that. She wasn't sure what, though she had several ideas. But that was a worry for the future. There were plenty of other things she needed to worry about, such as _getting _to Milwaukee in the first place, before she needed to deal with that particular problem.

50 minutes. Or perhaps 55. Aster had read enough about _Computers_ in pre-War books and magazines that she knew it was the plain, metal box-thing set in the shadows under the desk that was actually the _Computer _itself, rather than the more impressive looking TV screen or keyboard. That held the books and files. Aster had read once that a _Computer_ could hold the equivalent of hundreds or even thousands of books. She wasn't quite sure she believed it, as she didn't understand how writing could be made that small in the first place, or how a _Computer_ would be able to read writing that tiny. The little she had read on the subject made little sense, talking about magnets and hard drives and other things she had no experience with. But Aster was practical. She didn't need to know how it worked. She only needed to know that it DID work. She could figure out HOW later. Surely there had to be books about it, somewhere in Wisconsin.

An hour. Aster pulled the wires out of the back of the _Computer._ She left them dangling there. From what she had read about _Computers, _they all used the same few sorts of standard wires. There would surely be other such wires of the same type, somewhere in Wisconsin. Just as there had to be books about how the _Computers _worked., somewhere in that state. There had to be. She had to believe that.

She needed to get going. Aster looked around for something to protect the _Computer _with, and her eyes fell on a somewhat threadbare, dingy bathrobe that might once have been green. The same one she had seen a rather ugly old man wearing. At least, before he had taken it off and turned into a monster. She still couldn't figure out how that worked, and it bothered her as much as the problem of a hammer that couldn't be lifted. Was the Maestro magic in some way, like Thor's hammer?

Perhaps, but then, if he was magic, himself, then why wouldn't he be able to lift the hammer?

The implications of the Maestro somehow having magical powers, in addition to everything else he had, were too depressing to think about. Besides, if he were magic, then why would he had needed a frightened, 16 year old apprentice Zookeeper to try unsuccessfully to stop the miscarriage of his son? Surely he would have been able to do something himself, and something successful at that, if he were magic.

Besides, from what Aster knew about it, _Gammas, _such as the Maestro, were made by a bomb. Bombs weren't magic, they were made by science.

_But then,_ a mocking voice said in her head as she ducked back through the door of the room with her two prizes, _What was it that Pre-War author, what was his name, Heinlein something, said in a book? Any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic? Perhaps the Maestro's science and Thor's magic all amount to the same thing in the end. Gift's you'll never have, and can never defeat._

Well, maybe she couldn't. But maybe she didn't have to. All she had to do was get away. And even if she couldn't defeat all the magic and science that had existed before the War, perhaps the _Vampire_ Morbius, could. Supposedly he was a _Vampire_ that had somehow been made by science, rather than magic. But if it all came to the same thing, then that wouldn't make any difference in the end, then, would it?

Feeling rather self-satisfied with that line of reasoning, Aster found her way back to the storage room where she had ordered some soldiers to load the 9 pallets she had brought with bags of salt. It had now been an hour since she had left General Monroe. The soldiers in the room were just finishing loading the last pallet and fastening the netting around it as she walked in. One of them noticed the large, cloth wrapped bundle under her arm.

"What's that?" He pointed a dirty finger.

"It's the Maestro's _Computer." _Aster said in a tone that was deliberately even smugger than she felt. "You go tell General Monroe that. He'll be interested. You tell him that I saw it working a few years ago, and if it still works, I'm going to figure out how, when we get to the _Destination."_

The soldier frowned. "Do you think I should give it to the General?" He half reached for the bundle.

Aster stepped back and turned slightly, to protect the device. "You just tell him I have it. If he wants it himself, I'll give it to _him_. Not to you."

Aster did not think that General Monroe would take the _Computer _away from her. At least, not in the sense of not letting her use it. Possibly he would demand that one of the trusted officers in the Army of Darkness take actual physical possession of it. That was alright. Though it would make little sense, since nobody in the Army was likely to know any more about how to get the thing to work than she did, Aster did not care who actually owned the _Computer _so long as she could try to use it, and find out what secrets the Maestro might have written inside it.

In the meantime, the mere knowledge that Aster had the Maestro's _Computer_ would give General Monroe (and several other people who were sure to learn about it on the rumor vine in short order) one more thing to think about. One more distraction, so that they might not notice what she was going to be up to in the next few hours.

Aster slid the _Computer_ gently under the seat of the motorized forklift. The bathrobe rasped over rusty metal, and she could smell the rust in the air, but she was sure the cloth would protect the inside of the computer from any sort of dirt or dust on the ancient machine. She licked her lips in satisfaction once it was underneath. It fit snugly, and was well protected there.

"I'm going to load up the salt into my truck." Aster told them. "It'll take a while, I've got other things to do, as well. Like checking on those two children. Just leave the pallets lying here, and the door open. And if anyone else wants salt, to take to the _Destination, _there's plenty more here for them, too."

By now, of course, most of the members of the Army of Darkness had learned by gossip what Aster had told General Monroe. That salt was far less common in Wisconsin, than New York, and had had time to think through just how many things salt was used for, and how it might be something valuable to take along.

That was fine. Aster was greedy, but she didn't mind sharing, as long as she got what she needed. Of course, what she needed next was going to be far more than what some might consider her fair share of things, but that was not her fault. If she didn't get what she needed, they would all be doomed.

She hopped on the forklift and turned the key that started the battery powered motor. It hummed loudly and shook slightly, and Aster worried a bit for the _Computer_, and actually reached down to touch it, but decided it was probably safe. After all, sometime back before the War, _Computers _must have been transported on cars, or trains, or boats, and the trip could not have been perfectly smooth. Besides, if being on a forklift for a few hours would somehow break it, it would never make the trip to Wisconsin anyways, so there was no point in worrying about it.

Riding the forklift was far faster than walking or even jogging would have been. But Aster did not take the pallet of salt to her truck. Instead, she took a circuitous route, deliberately choosing to avoid areas such as the kitchen or baths, where other members of the Army were. Once she had gotten to a point where she didn't feel she was likely to encounter anyone else, she took the forklift deeper into the palace, to a rather unremarkable looking set of double doors. At least, they were unremarkable looking from the outside, or would have been had it not been for a large bloodstain on the floor. Several guards had been killed here by the Army, and there had not yet been time for anyone in the Army to find out what they had been guarding behind those doors.

Aster did not need to find out. She already knew. She had seen those unremarkable doors open more than once. Back when she had been a _Betty. _And her knowledge gave her a few short hours to do what she needed. Before anyone else in the Army had time to find out what was inside those dull looking doors.

The Maestro displayed his trophies in full view of the public. His symbols of fear. But he always hid his real treasures.

Aster left the forklift on, merely shifting it into the neutral gear, stepped out of it into the hallway, and took out the ring of keys she had stolen from the Maestro's secret room. There were over 20 of them. Probably each of them led to someplace valuable, and she wished she knew where all of them led to and could have every treasure and secret they guarded, but for now, she would be satisfied with only one of them working.

She had no way of knowing if any of them would work, of course. Other than to try them. Picking a key at random, she tried to put it into the lock.

It didn't fit.

Aster sighed in annoyance, slid the key around the ring, and methodically tried the next one.

Again, it didn't fit.

The next two keys fit, but wouldn't turn in the lock. Aster yanked them back out, and tried two more keys, one that wouldn't turn, and one that was far too small.

_Damn it. _She swore to herself. _One of them has to work!_

The seventh key fit and turned easily.

Aster breathed heavily, her heart pounding excitedly in her chest. She felt as if she were stalking an elusive deer, as she had so many years ago, and was about to loose an arrow right into it's heart. The smell of rust and grease from the ancient forklift was still in her nose, like blood and musk. Gasping slightly, she parted the doors, just enough to see if what she had glimpsed only a few times as a _Betty _was still hidden inside.

There was the barest gleam, reflected from the light of the hallways, and Aster licked her lips in voluptuous satisfaction.

It was still there. In the name of every God who might still be looking down on the human vermin that had survived the War, it was still there.

Aster sighed again, not in annoyance, but a nearly sensual satisfaction, and flung the two doors open wide. This, then, was the Maestro's treasure chamber. The storage room for most of the wealth he had taxed and stolen from the residents of Dystopia for over a century.

The light reflecting off the treasure made her want to blink, but her eyes seemed paralyzed, the pupils dilated and the lids glued open. She was helpless to stop looking from one pile of wealth to another. There were stacks of coins and precious metal bars, and coils of copper wire and buckets and boxes of jewelry and loose gems.

And the smell of rust, like blood, was still in her nose.

Aster looked again at the stacks of treasure. Everything that the humans in Dystopia had worked to earn, over a century, only to have it stolen by the Maestro. She was reminded of something she had read in one of her books once. The one that she thought was about the God of Trains. About a fat, evil ruler seizing people who were exhausted with the work they had done to grow a few grains of rice, and squeezing the people until the blood ran out of them, and squeezing the grains of rice until they turned into gems.

There was the smell of grease, like rancid meat, and Aster looked again at the treasure, and thought about it. She ran one finger over a pile of silver coins that would have filled ten bathtubs like the one she had used as a child.

It was dusty.

Aster thought about that. The Maestro had treasure… more than she even realized… but really, what did he ever need to spend it on? He took whatever he needed. Or whatever he merely wanted. Food. Women. Zoo animals. The best minds and the best works of art that still existed in Dystopia. The Maestro was the strongest one there was, and nobody could prevent him from simply taking anything he wanted. So he had no need to pay money for anything, like regular, weak, human beings.

So why did he even have all the treasure, locked up in an obscure room? Aster wondered about that. It seemed rather pointless to have money you never were going to spend, it was rather like having food you never intended to eat, or… Aster was forced to use a masculine analogy… for a man to have a woman around that he never intended to fuck. It was like the fable she had read once, of a miser who buried all his gold and intended for nothing but to save it forever and hold it once in a while. The gold had then been stolen, as Aster intended to do with this gold, and a wiser neighbor had told him that for all the use he was making of his wealth, he would have been just as well off with a gold painted rock.

She lifted one bar of gold in her hand. It was about twice the size of a brick, and surprisingly heavy. Probably as heavy as one of the bags of salt, although it was far smaller. That was alright. She had deliberately told the soldiers to underload the pallets. They could handle twice as much weight as was actually on them. They would have to.

Thoughtfully, she blew dust off the bar, thinking again about the book with the God of Trains in it. She pressed her lips against cold metal. Unlike the rust, it had no real smell, but there was a bad feeling in the pit of Aster's stomach, as if the gold were covered with blood, and she just couldn't see it. There had been a man in that book, Francis something or the other, who had played a game of tennis, in a rather perverse way. He hadn't even cared about how many points he got. In fact, he might have even lost the game, Aster couldn't remember. But the point of the way he played was that he wasn't playing to win, he was playing to make things as hard as possible for the person he was playing against.

No, the Maestro didn't need the money, Aster decided. He wasn't taxing and stealing from the people in Dystopia to make himself richer.

He was doing it to make everyone else poorer.

Aster got back onto her forklift, feeling better about what she was about to do. True, she was sort of stealing from the Army of Darkness, and taking more than her fair share of the loot from the Maestro's palace, but she was mostly stealing from the Maestro. And he had stolen it in the first place, anyways, and didn't even really need it, so it wasn't exactly like stealing. He deserved it.

_The way the Wolfkiller did? _A mocking voice in her head, asked.

But that wasn't really right. Daniel Wolfkiller had just had offensive manners. And Aster had only been a kid, then. Maybe it hadn't been right to sneak around in his private room and steal his bottle, but that didn't mean it wasn't right to steal from the Maestro.

The Maestro was _evil._

Besides, Aster needed the gold.

A lot of it.

Very badly.

She thought about her dead father, hanging from the ceiling, and her dead sister, whose body was lost in the mountain of corpses on one side of the Maestro's palace. And the severed hand she had seen only the previous night. And the woman, Patricia Miller, who she had killed. And a six year old boy who had been the main course at one of the Maestro's dinners. And other people she didn't know, and never would, who had starved in anonymity over the decades after the War. All the lives, spent and drained away so the Maestro could have a pile of metal he didn't even need. Hell, he probably didn't even care enough to _look_ at it, the way Aster liked looking at the color and sparkle of pre-War bottles.

It was blood money. All blood money. Ironic, or perhaps even suitable, given what she intended to use it for.

It had now been an hour and fifteen minutes since Aster had left General Monroe. She had no more time to dwell on the morality of what she was doing. She knew what had to be done, to save them all, and had made up her mind about it a long time ago.

Aster drove the forklift through the double doors, and turned off the motor, to save the batteries. She loosened the cargo netting slightly, and lifted several bags off the pallet. Then she began stacking gold bars in the center of the pallet, Neatly. This had to be done, just right.

60 bars of gold made a pile about as large as two bags of salt. Aster surround the bars with bags of salt all around the outside, then stacked ten bags in a single layer on top of them. When she was done, the gold could not be seen, and the pallet looked just like it had before. The gold was as hidden as an embryo in a womb.

That left her with two extra bags of salt, however. That would not do. She couldn't leave evidence behind.

She lifted the two bags, wincing as the weight was starting to get heavy, putting them on top of the pallet. They could not stay there, of course. Aster restarted the pallet jack and rolled down several hallways, until she came to a bathroom. She took one of the bags of salt, and tossed it against one wall. Then she did it with the second one. Possibly they would be found. Probably nobody would think anything of it. The Maestro's palace was in such a chaotic state that the 18 bags of salt she needed to hide were hardly likely to draw comment. Or even a second thought.

She drove her pallet jack out to her truck, which was backed up against a loading dock on one side of the Maestro's palace. There was a large combination lock on it. Aster got off the pallet jack again, spun the dial with numbers she had memorized, and opened the back.

She drove the pallet jack inside, lowered it's burden to the bottom of her truck, backed out, and snapped the lock back shut.

It was now an hour and 40 minutes since she had left General Monroe.

She had 8 more pallets of salt that she needed to hide gold on.

It would take at least three hours.

Sooner or later General Monroe would probably start wondering what Aster was up to. She knew that the General didn't trust her, and the damnable thing was that he was actually right not to trust her. What she was doing was wrong, and a betrayal of the Army of Darkness. But it still had to be done.

_Three more hours_, Aster thought to herself.

It seemed like far too much time.

Too much time in which to be noticed…

….and not nearly enough time to do the job.


	34. Chapter 34

Note to my readers, I made a slight change in chapter 15. And, as always, I will appreciate any comments on the new chapter 33 and the story as a whole.


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